The Lighting of Low Withern

A tale of the Central Sog, set down in the manner of a Low Withern witness account: being the first electric lamp the west parish ever saw, the man who paid for it, and what the parish did about him afterwards.

Low Withern is the parish the realm goes to when it wants to know what really happened. Its people are the best witnesses in Sogmarsh — they notice everything, report it plainly, and add nothing — and it is from their accounts, taken down one winter and kept, that this is told.

What the parish saw first. A wheel.

Wat Sarn, the Drudgeford miller, keeps his mill on the Sog where the Low Withern lane comes down to the river, and lives in the mill-house over it. He had always had one waterwheel for his stones. That summer he built a second, smaller one, on the mill-race, and fixed to it a thing none of us had seen: a drum of copper wire as big as a cheese, in an iron case, with a short cord of wire run from it up through the floor into his own front room. We watched it being built for a month. Nobody asked what it was. You don't ask a miller his business; he'll only take a bigger toll off you for asking.

What the parish heard. That it was electric.

The word had come down the Sog from Murkminster, where there are said to be three or four such lamps in the great houses, and one in the Chancery, lit on feast days. There is one in Castle Bastable; everyone knows the story of that one and does not tell it at table. But there had never been one west of Drudgeford. And now there was to be one in Low Withern, in the miller's front window, because the miller had money — he takes his toll off every sack of grain in the parish, and has done for thirty years — and because the miller, it was generally agreed, wanted everybody to know it.

What happened on the night. The whole parish came.

Nobody was invited. The miller put up no notice. But on the evening of the first frost of the Short, when the lamp was to be lit, every soul in Low Withern happened to be passing the mill-house at dusk: the Fishers and the Coles, the smith and his boys, old Mother Pargeter carried in her chair, children on shoulders. It was cold. We stood in the lane with our breath going up and our hands in our sleeves and said we were only passing.

The miller came out on his step in his best coat. He did not make a speech. Wat Sarn is not a speech-making man; he is known to the parish for the miller's thumb and the miller's toll and the miller's grudge, and for not much else, and he stood on his step looking at us all with a face like a man who has been caught at something. Then he went in, and below, in the mill, his boy let the race run onto the little wheel, and we heard it begin to turn — a slow wet knocking, then faster — and a humming came up through the floor of the house, very faint, like bees in a wall.

What we saw. Light.

It came up in the miller's front window slowly, the colour of a coal going from dull to orange, and then it steadied, and it was light — not a candle's light, which moves, but a still, small, yellow, perfectly steady light, in a glass bulb no bigger than an egg, hung from the miller's ceiling on a cord. It lit the miller's front room: his table, his chair, his clock, a jug. It did not flicker. It did not smoke. The wind came down the lane and every candle-lantern in the crowd guttered, and the light in the miller's window did not so much as notice.

Mother Pargeter said, "Well." That is the whole of her account. Most of the parish's accounts are not much longer.

How long it lasted. Some while.

We stood and looked at it. Nobody said anything much. The children were lifted up to see. The smith, who understands iron, went to the window and looked for a long time at the glass egg and came back and said it was a very small fire in a very small bottle and he didn't see how it breathed. It was not bright. A good oil-lamp is brighter. But it was steady, and it was strange, and it was the first of its kind in the west of the realm, and we understood — all of us, without saying — that it was the miller's money we were looking at, made into light, and hung up in his window for us to see.

Then the frost came down harder, and the children began to cry with the cold, and one by one, the way a parish does, we went home.

What we did at home. Lit the candles.

That is all. We went home to our own houses along the dark lane and lit our own candles and our own rush-lights and our own fires, the way we always have; and the light was yellow and it moved and it smoked and it was ours. And from most of the houses in Low Withern, if you went upstairs, you could see down the lane to the mill-house window, and the little steady egg of light burning on in it, all night, and the miller sitting under it at his table on his own.

What the parish noticed next morning. That he had sat there till dawn.

The Coles' boy, who was up in the night with the colic, saw it. The miller sat under his light the whole night through, not reading, not working, just sitting at his table in the steady yellow, alone, in the only electric light for twenty miles, with his hands in front of him. And when the light went out at dawn — the race ran low, and the little wheel slowed — the Coles' boy saw him get up and put his head in his hands.

What the parish did. It is recorded here plainly, as it was done.

Nobody arranged it. That is the Low Withern way. But on the next evening, at dusk, the Fishers came down the lane to the mill carrying their supper in a pot, and knocked at the mill-house. And the Coles came after them with a loaf. And the smith brought his boys and a jug. And old Mother Pargeter was carried down in her chair with her knitting. And by dark the miller's front room, which had never had more than the miller in it, was full of Low Withern: eating its suppers off its knees, arguing, knitting, the children under the table, under the miller's electric light.

The miller stood in his own doorway for a long while with his mouth open.

Then he said — Mrs Fisher reports it word for word — "You'll want to mind the cord. It's hot."

And then he fetched the chairs.

What has happened since. The parish has continued to take its supper at the mill on the evenings of the Short.

Not every evening. You'd not want to take advantage. But often. The light is not bright to read by and it goes out when the race runs low, and the parish has not taken to electricity and has no plans to; we go home to our candles, and we like them. But the miller's toll, this last year, has been — it is noted in the Fishers' account, and in the Coles', and in the smith's — somewhat less than it was. Nobody has mentioned this to the miller. He has not mentioned it to anyone.

And the lamp in the mill window is, by general agreement, the finest thing in the west of the realm; not for the light, which is poor, but because it is the one place in Low Withern where, all through the Short, you can be sure of finding somebody in.

Witnessed. Set down plain. Nothing added.