Wayne pondered this when he had settled himself at his own desk. In normal circumstances he saw little of his father during the day. Colonel Craighill usually took luncheon with half a dozen men of his own age who represented the solid interests of Pittsburg. He prided himself on his knowledge of the general business conditions; he liked, as he put it, to keep in touch with the life of the city, and he so managed his hour and a half at the Allequippa as to gain information from authoritative sources on all manner of subjects. He was more or less conscious of the fact that he touched life on more sides than the majority of his fellows. They talked of iron and coal because they were, like himself, interested in forges and mines; but he could discuss cotton with knowledge of the conditions in India, or wheat, with the Argentine forecast in his mind. He subscribed for English reviews which he occasionally passed on to business friends whose narrower horizons were otherwise amply illuminated by the newspapers.
The Allequippa Club, at the luncheon hour, became a seething board of trade whose unrecorded transactions ran to large figures. Stock subscription papers were handed from table to table as carelessly as the wine card. Through these years of the Great Prosperity it was as easy to count millions as to count heads. In fact, Mr. Richard Wingfield, watching and listening in his corner, announced that a million had become a contemptible sum that hardly assured one’s daily bread.
Wayne Craighill was, in the fullest sense, a child of the city. Its oldest blood was in his veins. His mother had been a Wayne, the daughter of a merchant whose great-grandfather had fought in the Continental army, and whose grandfather had shared Perry’s glory on Lake Erie. The Craighills were not so old on this soil, but the name was not a negligible one in local history. Wayne’s grandfather Craighill had sat in the State Legislature and in Congress, and when Roger Craighill married the only daughter of the house of Wayne and the last of the family, the best blood of the State was united. The Craighill building, rising tower-like in the steep, narrow street of this many-towered Babel, spoke not merely for present affluence, but for the prescience that had secured and held the iron hills surrounding.
Eastern Pennsylvania is better known in song, story and history than the state’s western hills, but the Greater City, big, brawny, powerful, sprawled over valley and hill where the broad rivers gather new courage for their adventure seaward, hides in its iron heart many and sonorous Iliads. It may fairly be said that Pennsylvania is our most typical state and Pittsburg our most typical city, for here the weakness and strength of the democracy wage daily war. Here political corruption has been venomously manifested. Those who seek to account for the unaccountable ask whether the old Scotch clan-instinct has not reasserted itself in the politics of the state. The question is suggestive; but it may not be discussed in these pages. The spirit of Democracy, brooding upon the hills, and looking down upon the City of the Iron Heart, must smile often, wondering that a people so highly favoured and with antecedents so honourable, tamely submit to plunder and bend their necks so meekly to the spoilsman. But a new era was even now at hand. “There shall be an highway for the remnant of his people,” declared Isaiah, prophet of the day of kings, but a higher light was already stealing into the Iron City. The “remnant” was proving its own quality by searching out the squalor of its back doors and “runs” where wan spectres of Decadence elbowed ill-begotten, helpless, staring-eyed Defectives and Dependents.
It may be said that at Pittsburg the East ends and the West begins. The division is in nothing more pronounced than in the speech of the native. In the noonday throng of the Allequippa Club it puzzles the stranger. It is not the lazy drawl that crept into the Central West from the Southeast with the early migration, and that is still discernible wherever the old stock has held its own, but a hybrid wrought of Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch influences. It is less interesting for elisions and the flattening of vowels than for its cadences. In familiar dialogue these are marked and weave a spell upon the unfamiliar ear. They are not peculiar to the man in the street, but flavour in the polite babble of drawing rooms. They lure the ear of strangers, and newcomers unconsciously adopt them. The operators at the telephone exchange teach the most common and the most readily communicable of these cadences daily. In repeating a number of four figures the voice invariably rises on the next to the last syllable to fall again at the end. The native tongue, long attuned to this practice, adds a word to short sentences so that the intonation may not fail to scan and thus miss its effect. For example: “Did he get it?” does not quite lend itself to the usage; but if we prefix And: (And did he get it?) the speaker satisfies his own ear. Those who are keen for controversy in such matters may gnaw this bone all they like. Some will trace it to Scotch, others to Irish influences; but from the lips of the pretty girls of the Greater City, whether behind shop counters or tea tables, it is melodious and haunting. To some shrewder pen than this must be left a prediction as to the ultimate fate of our language at this great Western gateway, where the mingling of dialects spoken under all the flags of Europe is bound to exert in time new influences on the common speech.
As Colonel Craighill and his son entered the Club to-day commerce seemed less insistently dominant. Their names had been on many lips; and they were at once the centre of attraction. The ticker curled its tape unnoticed in the basket while the Craighill marriage was discussed. As the two checked their coats the congratulations began, and in the lounging room they were immediately the centre of a group of friends. Wayne, it seemed, was the object of more attention than his father; the “Colonel,” as nearly everyone called him would of course beam in his characteristic way; but Wayne, in his own relation to the matter, was to be viewed in a fresh aspect. There were those among his intimates who chaffed him about his new stepmother. She would, they hinted, undoubtedly visit upon him the traditional contumely of stepmothership. Others re-appraised the Craighill millions with a view of determining just how much the new wife’s advent would cut into the expectations of Mrs. Blair and Wayne. Roger Craighill’s first wife, everyone remembered, had brought him a considerable fortune, and many were now trying to recall how much of this had reposed in him, and how much had passed direct to the children.
Dick Wingfield, who crystalized in his own person the Greater City’s aspirations in art and music, declared as he surveyed the large dining room and contemplated the two Craighills in their unusual intimacy, that for the hour Pig Iron had yielded the centre of the stage to Cupid. Many gentlemen left their tables, napkin in hand, to congratulate the Colonel; and Wayne, too, submitted his hand to many grasps, some of them lingeringly sympathetic, others expressive of a general friendliness and liking. The Colonel was a shrewd one, so many remarked; it was a real stroke to present himself to the eye of the Greater City in company with his son on this memorable day. It was not like Colonel Craighill to make a marriage that would estrange his children; the outward and visible acceptance by them of the impending union was indubitably presented in the corner where father and son ate their luncheon together. When there came a lull in the visits to the Craighill table Wingfield lounged thither, and drew up his chair for a chat with Wayne. Not being a hypocrite, Wingfield shook hands with the Colonel but did not refer to the topic of the hour. He addressed himself to Wayne on the prospects of the Greater City’s orchestra for the winter and called his attention to some new pictures at the Art Institute. He mentioned the presence in America of a great French portrait painter with whose work Mr. Craighill was familiar.
“You should certainly have him paint you, Colonel. This is the best place in the world for the assembling of works of art; the grime soon makes old masters of them all. The orchestra trustees meet at three this afternoon in the board room of the Fine Arts building. Your check was generous, Colonel; but Wayne will have to work. Don’t forget the meeting, Wayne. We count on him, Colonel Craighill. By the way, Wayne, an old friend of ours has turned up here—Paddock of agile legs and stammering tongue. What profits it, may I ask, for any man to lay up store of wealth for his children when they’re likely to scorn the fleshpots for locusts and wild honey? One might expect Paddock to come here to study the iron business, but bless me! he’s come to save our souls.”
“Yes; I’ve seen Jimmy.”
“I thought you hadn’t seen him,” remarked Colonel Craighill in surprise.