“That’s steel,” said Gib with a gesture of scorn.
The men then laid half of the broken rail with one end on the ground, the other resting on the pig iron block, and hit it a blow with a spike maul. Again it snapped.
“That’s a steel rail,” said Gib, “to run locomotives and cars over. It breaks as you see,—like glass. When they unload steel rails for track laying they let them over the side of the car in ropes for fear they will break if they fall on the ground.”
The same four men, evidently trained in this demonstration, went directly to another pile of rails, carelessly picked up the one nearest to hand, laid it on the ground against a stout iron post and attached to each end of it a chain working to a windlass some distance off. Then they started the windlass. As it wound in the chains, pulling at both ends of the rail, the rail began to bend at the middle around the post. As the windlass continued to wind the rail continued to bend until it became the shape of a hairpin, without breaking, without the slightest sound or sign of fracture.
“That is one of our iron rails,” said Gib. “You can’t break it. Look at the bend, inside and out.”
John looked. The bent part was smooth on the outside and a little wrinkled on the inside. There was no break in the fibre.
“Do it for yourself as often as you like,” said Gib. “That’s what the men are here for. We buy steel rails to break. Bring anyone who wants to see it. Devise any other test you can think of. I want you to sell iron rails.” Suddenly he became strange from suppressed emotion. “Steel is a crime,” he said, in a tone of judgment. “The only excuse for it is that it’s cheaper than iron. The public doesn’t know. Congress doesn’t care. It lets these foreign steel rails come in to compete with American iron rails. The gamblers who build railroads are without conscience. They buy them. Yet a man who lays steel rails in a railway track is a common murderer! He will come to be so regarded.”
John was embarrassed. Gib’s exhibition of feeling seemed to him inadequately explained by the technical facts. The possibility that personal facts were primarily involved made him suddenly hot and uncomfortable. Steel, he knew, had been the symbol of his father’s defeat in New Damascus. Correspondingly, iron had been the symbol of Enoch’s triumph. Was it that Enoch hated steel as he hated Aaron? That his feeling for steel was his feeling for Aaron?
It partly was. That day, twenty-five years gone, when Aaron made his spectacular steel experiment, with Esther watching from the Woolwine Mansion terrace, was a day of agony for Enoch. To Aaron and Esther a victorious outcome meant power, fortune, the thrill of achievement. For Enoch it meant extinction. He could not have survived it in mind or body. Simply, he would have died.
The failure of the experiment saved him. It plucked him back from the edge of the void. It saved him in the sight and respect of New Damascus. And he had a feeling that it saved him even in the eyes of Esther, though from what or for what he could not have said. Forever after the word steel had a non-metallurgical meaning. It associated in the depths of his emotional nature with black, ungovernable ideas, including the idea of death.