And now this rare, this altogether improbable irony of teaching Aaron’s son the iron trade! of demonstrating to him the fallibility of steel! of sending him forth from New Damascus to sell iron rails against steel!
Did Gib relish the irony? gloat on it, perhaps? That may not be answered clearly. There was at any rate a strong rational motive in his behavior.
Hitherto New Damascus rails had sold themselves. Therefore Gib had no sales department in his organization. Now steel rails were coming in and steel rails were being sold. There was a powerful selling campaign behind them. The competition was not yet alarming, but it was serious and likely to increase, and the way to meet it was to sell iron rails. Gib had business foresight. It revealed to him the use of salesmanship to meet a new condition. What he had been seeking was not then so quickly to be found. That was a selling genius. John Breakspeare was not the first young man he had personally conducted through the testing yard. Three had already failed him and he was wondering where he should look for another prospect when Aaron’s son appeared. Gib perceived or felt in him the latency of what he wanted. If the same young man had been anyone else he would have taken hold of him in precisely the same way. The fact of his being Aaron’s son—no Esther’s—was one to be set aside. The relationship was experimental, on the plane of business, and what might come of it—well, that would appear.
On John’s part a personal sensibility at the beginning gradually wore away as he discovered the drift of events, which was this:
The star of iron was threatened in the first phase of its glory.
The day of steel was breaking.
It was not a brilliant event. It was like a cloudy dawn, unable to make a clean stroke between the light and the dark. Yet everyone had a sense of what was passing in this dimness.
Gib, whose disbelief in steel rested as much upon pain memories and hatred as upon reason, was a fanatic; but at the same time great numbers of men with no such romantic bias of mind were violently excited on one side or the other of a fighting dispute. Fate decided the issue. The consequences were such as become fate. They were tremendous, uncontrollable, unimaginable. They changed the face of civilization. Vertical cities, suburbs, subways, industrialism, the rise of a wilderness in two generations to be the paramount nation in the world, victory in the World War,—those were consequences.
It is to be explained.
Less than ten years after Aaron’s failure the great Bessemer process, a way of producing steel direct from ore, was successfully evolved in England, and the British now were producing steel, especially steel rails, in considerable quantities. Americans as usual were procrastinating, digressive, self-obstructing. The Bessemer patents were bought and brought to this country. A Kentucky iron master filed an interference on the ground that although he hadn’t developed it in practice he had had that same idea himself, and had had it first, and his contention was sustained. Several years were lost in wrangling over rights. Meanwhile, England entered the American market with steel rails. These now were competing with iron rails. When at last the Bessemer process began to be tried in this country the principle of perversity that animates the untamed elements bewitched it. Disappointments were so continuous, so humiliating, so extremely disastrous, that a period was when one would have thought the whole thing much more likely to be abandoned than persevered with. And when at length there was a useable product at all it was a poor and very uncertain product, comparing unfavorably with English steel, and how the English steel rails compared with good American iron rails has already been witnessed in Gib’s mill yard.