They descended again, by the blackened brick, box-like office of the superintendent, to the level of the pit, retraced the way over the boardwalk. They passed a cavernous interior, filled with a continuous crashing, where a great sheet of flushing steel was propelled over a system of rollers through a black, dripping compression. "I can take you to the Senate," James Polder told them, once more outside; "or the Engineers' Society. Dinner will be ready at the club."
He conducted them into the serious interior of a large, solidly constructed dwelling that had been transformed into a club. The dining room was already filling but they secured a small table against the wall. Across the floor ten or twelve men were gathered in a circle. Some, Howat thought, were surprisingly young for the evident authority in their manner, pronouncements; others were grey, weatherworn, men with immobile faces often lost, in the middle of a gay period, in a sudden gravity of thought, silent calculation. He saw the smooth, deft hands of draughtsmen, and scarred, powerful hands that, like James Polder's, had laboured through apprenticeship in pit and mill shop.
He recognized that Polder was more drawn than he had first observed. He was sapped by the crushing entity of the steel works, the enormous heat and energy and strain of the open hearth. If the younger did not lay off he would, unquestionably, break. Nevertheless, Howat was totally unprepared for the amazing suggestion quietly advanced by Mariana. "Jimmy," she said, "couldn't you come to Shadrach for those two weeks? You'd find the quiet there wonderful. And any doctor will advise you to leave your family for a proper rest. I'm certain Howat would be as nice as possible."
A sudden, patent longing leaped to James Polder's countenance. Actually he stuttered with a surprised delight. Damn it, there was nothing for him, Howat, to do but stare like a helpless idiot. He ought to say something, second Mariana's impudent invitation, at once. She ignored him, gazing intently at the younger man. He, too, meeting Mariana's eyes, had apparently totally forgot the unimportant presence of Howat Penny. And he had been married to his Harriet for a scant half year! Howat Penny thought mechanically of the Polders' depressing house, the odours of old cooking and cheap cigarettes, the feverish yapping of the silky animal, Cherette, with matted, pinkish eyes. The precipitant, prideful, young fool! Why hadn't he held onto the merest memory, the most distant chance in the world, of Mariana, rather than fling himself, his injured self-opinion, into this stew?
"Don't say it can't be managed," she persisted. "Anything may. It's absolutely necessary; you can get a prescription—two weeks of green valley and robins and country eggs. Howat will take your money from you at penny sniff, and I'll—I'll come out for dinner."
"Harriet thought of going back to the family," he replied; "but it might—" he turned at last to Howat Penny. "Would you have me?" he asked directly. What, in thunder, choice of reply did he have? Howat couldn't point out the shamelessness of such an arrangement. Harriet, it seemed, was not to be considered; just as if she were a merely disinterested connection. He issued a belated period to the effect that Shadrach was spacious and Rudolph a capable attendant. It was, he saw, sufficient. "We can write," said Mariana. She endeavoured to caress Howat's hand, but he indignantly frustrated her.
"I'll have to get back to the hearth," James Polder announced regretfully. "It's been wonderful," he told Mariana Jannan. Howat scraped his chair at the baldness of Polder's pleasure. "Your work is tremendous, Jim," she replied; "the only stirring thing I have ever known in a particularly silly world. But you mustn't let it run you, too, into steel rails. President Polder," she smiled brilliantly at him. "Why not?" queried James, the sanguine, at once defiant, haggard and intense.
XXXII
The following day Howat Penny was both weary and irritable. Mariana declared, remorsefully, that she had selfishly dragged him away from Shadrach; and proposed countless trivial amends, which he fretfully blocked. He had no intention of affording her such a ready escape from a sense, he hoped, of error and responsibility. Before dinner, however, he found himself walking with her over the deep green sod that reached to the public road below. A mock orange hedge enclosed his lawn, bounding the cross roads, the upper course leading to Myrtle Forge; and beyond they passed, on the left, the collapsed stone walls and fallen shingles of what, evidently, had been a small blacksmith's shed. Farther along they came to the sturdy shell of an old, single-room building, erected, perhaps, when Shadrach Furnace was new, with weeds climbing through the rotten floor, and a fragment of steps, rising to the mouldering peak of a loft, still clinging to a wall.