“Oh, well, since I talk to experts, for the most part we get what we try for, but sometimes I admit we are baffled.”
“You are baffled?” said a foreign gentleman. “Have you not the mechanical rule and the chemical formula?”
Jasper smiled. “Scientific rules are useful, but steel-making is not altogether a mechanical process. Something depends on the workman’s inherited, and perhaps instinctive, skill. There’s the weak link, because human nature is not stable. Man goes by sight and touch, and, so far as he is mechanical, a small defect puts the machine out of gear. I expect bad cooking accounts for some bad steel.”
“I’ve known bad brewing accountable,” remarked the inspector.
“We use some precautions,” said Jasper dryly, and addressed the foreigners. “The rules and formulæ help, but one is fronted by an incalculable factor. Sometimes it’s human weakness; sometimes it’s the contrary chance, that is as yet determined by rules we do not know. When one gets old, one finds out that man’s knowledge is limited.”
“Es verdad. Ya lo creo!” said the dark-skinned admiral. “Monsieur est philosophe!”
“I’m a steel-forger, and I agreed to show you the process by which we make the goods you want,” said Jasper, smiling. “Lets go to the casting-pit.”
They crossed a big open-sided shed and climbed to an iron platform surrounding a circular pit. The evening was cold and a boisterous wind blew about the forge and scattered clouds of iron scale. Naked lights in long rows flickered and slanted; dazzling reflections leaped from furnace doors, and a trail of radiance marked the passage of a white-hot bloom. When the noisy truck vanished all by contrast got indistinct but for the sparks that tossed about the crashing steam-hammers.
Engines throbbed, heavy wheels rolled, and metal clanged on iron floors. In the smoke and turmoil shadowy workmen moved about. For a few moments Jasper leaned against the greasy rails and his glance searched the forge, but Ledward knew he listened. The machines were like an orchestra, and a jarring note would indicate that an instrument was out of tune. Jasper knew the pitch of all; the cold-saws’ thin treble, the roll-trains’ measured rumble, and hammers’ thunderous bass.
The platform was a semi-circle and on each side was a large, pear-shaped iron vessel lined by fireclay. The vessels were pivoted near the middle, and turned up and down. Above each was a hole in the roof. Underneath, four or five yards below the platform, a row of hollow iron molds, about three feet high, went round the pit. In the gloom workmen waited.