THE CINDER BUGGY

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE DRIVER

“A good, rapidly moving novel of ‘Wall Street’ methods, written by a man who knows.”

—Springfield Republican

“The book is among the most absorbing which we have read recently.”

—Heywood Broun in The World

“I feel as did Mark Sullivan, who said: ‘Garet Garrett has written one of the great novels of the day.’... That is beside the point to one who wants to study man and his work.... The thing that impresses me is its fidelity to life.”

—Bernard M. Baruch.

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

THE CINDER BUGGY
A FABLE IN IRON AND STEEL

BY
GARET GARRETT
AUTHOR OF “THE DRIVER,” “THE BLUE WOUND,” ETC.

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue

Copyright, 1923
By E. P. Dutton & Company

All Rights Reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA

THE CINDER BUGGY

A pot-metal body

on two little wheels,

absurdly,

bow-leggedly

walking away to the dump

with the slag, the

purgings of iron, the

villainous drool of the furnace—

that is a cinder buggy.

It is also a sign

that what man refines

beyond

God’s content

with things as he left them

will very soon perish

for want of the dross

from which it is parted.

Why hath each thing its cinder?—

even the sweetest desire?

THE CINDER BUGGY

I

A generation has fled since a stranger was seen in the streets of New Damascus on an errand of business.

The town has nothing to sell except the finest wrought iron in the world. As the quality of this iron is historic and the form of it a standard muck bar for use in further manufacture you order it from afar at a price based on what is current in Pittsburgh.

Sellers of merchandise miss New Damascus on purpose. It is a catalogue town. It buys nothing because it is new, nothing it does not need, has no natural pride in waste whatever.

Strangers are not unwelcome, only they must not mind to be stared at. The town is shy and jealous and has the air of keeping a secret.

There are no sights to see. Once people came great distances, even from Europe, to see the New Damascus blast furnaces. They were the first of their kind to be built in this country, had features new in the world, and made the scene wild and awesome at night. All that is long past. There is only a trace of the mule railroad by which ore came down from the mountains. Where the furnaces were are great green holes. Nature has had time to heal her burns. No ore has been mined or smelted at New Damascus for many years. Yet the place is still famous for its fine wrought iron. The ore now comes from the top of the Great Lakes, stops at Pittsburgh to be smelted, and arrives at New Damascus in the form of pigs to be melted again, puddled and rolled into malleable bars. That may be done anywhere. It is done at many places. But it is so much better done at New Damascus than anywhere else that the product will bear the cost of all that transportation. The reasons why this is so belong to tradition, to the native pride of craftmanship, to that mysterious touch of the hand that is learned only in one place and cannot be taught. The iron workers here, descended from English, Scotch and Welsh smiths imported to this valley, are the best puddlers and rollers in the world. Therefore as people they are dogmatic, stubborn and brittle.

There is the old Woolwine mansion on the east hill, there is the Gib mansion on the west hill. Nobody would recommend them to the sense of wonder. Besides they are disremembered. They were once very grand though ugly. They are no longer grand and have been made much uglier by architectural additions of a cold ecclesiastical character. One is a nunnery. One is a monastery. The church got them for less than the walks and fences cost. Only a church could use them. All that the indwellers knew about them is that the woodwork polishes easily and must have been very expensive. The grounds are still nice.

The river is lovely, but nobody has ever cared for it esthetically. The town is set with its back stoop to the river, as to an alleyway or tradesmen’s entrance, facing the mountains where its wealth first was.

Sights? No. Unless it be the sight of a town that seems to exist in a state of unending reverie. This is fancy. New Damascus appears to be haunted with memories of things confusedly forgotten, as if each night it dreamed the same dream and never had quite remembered it.

In the Woolwine library there is a memory of distinction in sixty parts,—bound volumes of the New Damascus Intelligencer back to 1820. There was a newspaper! An original poem, a column humorous, a notable speech on the slavery question, the secret of Henry Clay’s ruggedness discovered in the fact that he bathed his whole person once a day in cold water, and the regular advertisers, all on the first page. One of the advertisers was a Wm. Wardle, bookseller, stationer, importer of all the current English imprints, proprietor of a very large stock of the world’s best literature, periodicals, and so forth. Wm. Wardle’s name is still on the lintel of the three-story building he occupied until about 1870. The ground floor now is rented to a tobacconist who keeps billiard tables in the back for the iron workers, the upper floors are in disuse, and there is no bookshop in New Damascus. Well, that is a sight, perhaps, only nobody would think to show it to you, because much stranger than the disappearance of that important old bookshop is the fact that no one can remember ever to have missed it.

If you mention this curious fact to the First National Bank president he helps you look at the faded name of Wardle above the tobacconist’s sign and says, “Well!” precisely as he would help you to look at one of the great green holes where a blast furnace was and say, “Well, well!” never having seen it before.

“What do people now read in New Damascus?”

“Magazines,” says the banker. “I find if I read the Sunday newspapers I get everything I want.”

“How do you account for the fact that New Damascus, an iron town, has fewer people to-day than it had fifty years ago?”

“You’ve touched the answer,” says the banker. “It is an iron town. Always was. When modern steel making came in fifty or sixty years ago anybody might have known that steel would displace iron. New Damascus stuck to iron.”

“Lack of enterprise, you mean?”

“Something like that.”

“Yet New Damascus had the enterprise to roll the first rails that were made in this country.”

“Yes, they rolled the first American rails here,—iron rails.”

“And having done that there was not enough enterprise left merely to change the process from iron to steel?”

“Well, there was some reason. I’ve heard it said a committee of New Damascus business men went out to investigate the steel process. They reported there was nothing in it. Then the steel rail knocked the iron rail out completely. There isn’t an iron rail made anywhere in the world now.”

“And nails. New Damascus was once the seat of the nail industry. What became of that?”

“Same thing. They made iron nails here,—what we call cut nails. The cheap steel wire nail knocked the iron nail out. Then, of course, you must remember that when the Mesaba ore fields were opened we had to close our mines. We couldn’t compete with that ore. It was too cheap.”

“That wasn’t inevitable, was it? Since New Damascus stopped, other towns have grown up from nothing in this valley,—towns with no better transportation to begin with, no record behind them, hauling their raw material even further.”

“Yes,” says the banker. “Well, I don’t know. There’s something wrong in the atmosphere here.”

The banker on the next corner has another explanation.

“It’s the labor,” he says. “People who’ve been around tell me, and I believe it’s true, that labor here is more independent, more exacting, harder to deal with, than labor anywhere else. In other mill towns you’ll find Italians, Hungarians, Polacks and that like. All our labor was born here. Jobs go from father to son. Foreigners can’t come in.”

“That’s strange. One never hears of any serious labor trouble at New Damascus—not the kind of trouble they have in other mill towns.”

“Not that kind,” says the banker. “There’s a very peculiar thing about labor in New Damascus. It can live without work.”

“How?”

“I don’t know how. It just does. When anything happens these people don’t like they stop work. That’s all there is to it.”

“Is it a union town?”

“They don’t need a union.”

Bankers in New Damascus are like bankers anywhere else. They know much more than they believe and tell only such things as ought to be true. It is scandalous for labor to be able to live without work. That offends the economic law. It ought not to be so. Yet in so far as it is there is no mystery about it. The town is invisibly rich and has a miserly spirit. There are as many banks as churches,—and the people are very religious. The banks are full of money that cannot be loaned in New Damascus. It is sent away to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New York to put out at interest on other people’s enterprise. If you ask why that is the answer is cynical.

“Perhaps,” says the banker, “we know each other too well.”

But you see how it is that labor may live without work. Everybody has something by,—a home, a bit of land, a little hoard to sit upon. Spending is unfashionable. Carried far it is sinful. Living is very cheap. Three mornings a week the farmers come in with fresh killed meat, sausage, poultry, eggs, cheese, butter and vegetables and turn the main street into an open air market; and there is an ordinance which forbids the shopkeepers to buy any of this produce before ten o’clock. By that time there is nothing left, or if there is no dealer wishes to buy it, since the demand is already satisfied.

But there is still the question: What happened to New Damascus?

Ask John Tizack, the tobacconist, in the old Wardle building. He meets you with the air of a man of the world and pretends to be not in the least surprised when you say: “I’ve asked everybody else and now I ask you. What’s the matter with this place?”

“Neighbor,” he says, “I was born here, my father before me and his before him. I began as a lad in the mill here. Everything in New Damascus came out of that mill. I say everything. That isn’t exactly right. Them mansions on the hill,—they came out of it. The library, that row of fine houses you may have seen on what we call Quality Street, all the big and little fortunes you see people living on here, came out of that mill. When I was twenty-five I says to myself, ‘I’ll see a bit of the world before I die. Some of it anyhow.’ That was thirty years ago,—yes, thirty-two. I’ve been to New York City and Buffalo and around. Now I’m back. I’m going to die here. This ain’t a bad business if you look at it right. Not so bad. And you want to know what’s the matter with this place? You’ve been asking everybody else. What do they tell you?”

“This and that. No two alike.”

“S’what I thought,” he says. “I couldn’t agree with them. There’s men in this town, merchants, mind you—well, you wouldn’t believe it. There’s not ten business men in this town been as far away as Philadelphia. I know what I’m saying. I won’t mention any names, but I happen to know the president of the biggest bank in town was never in New York City.”

“Is that what’s the matter?”

“Now wait,” he says. “You see the kind of place I got here. No profanity. Nothing at all. I know the boys that come here every night. Iron workers you might say, but they’re gentlemen, in a way of speaking. They play billiards, smoke, talk. Not one of them under thirty. Went to school with most of them. Their fathers was born here like mine. And they don’t get treated right. Now I’m telling you. They’re the best iron men in the country, bar none, and they don’t get treated right.”

“So that’s it?”

“No, that ain’t it either. I’m just telling you some of the things that’s wrong with this place. You asked me the straight question, didn’t you?”

At this point he gives you a piercing look. Are you also a man of the world? He seems to doubt it. You may be one of those people who go around talking just for the excitement of it.

It is necessary to remind him that he was apparently coming to something else,—to the point, perhaps. He waits for you to do so. Then with an air of extreme asperity, meaning that you shall get all you came for, he clears the top of the showcase and leans at you with his bristles raised, looking first toward the back room, which is empty, then towards the street, which is clear, and lastly at you in a pugnacious way.

“You asked me, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you happen to believe in any of them unnatural things?”

“Such as what?”

“Such as haunts and spells?”

“More or less.”

“All right,” he says. “Now neighbor, take it or leave it. Suit yourself. I’ve seen my share of this world and I know what I’m talking about. That’s what’s the matter with this place.”

“What?”

“What I’m telling you, and I’m going to die here. There’s a spell on it. Nobody can help it. There’s a spell on it. Now that’s all.”

“Who put it on?”

“Oh, well, n-o-w,” he says, becoming irresponsible. “That’s different. That’s very different again. I’m not telling you anything I don’t know. Who put it on? I tell you frankly I don’t know. Maybe you’ll be smart enough to find that out. To speak the truth, I don’t know as it’s anything I want to meddle with.”

There is a difference, you see, between a banker and a tobacconist. A tobacconist believes more than he knows and tells things that ought not to be so.

Still, there is the fact. New Damascus, having cradled the metallurgical industry, ought to have grown up with it and simply did not. A town that rolled the first American rails smaller now than it was fifty years ago! Why? If it had died you could understand that. But it is not dead. Its health is apparently perfect. There is not a sore spot on its body. It functions in a kind of somnambulistic manner. The last thing you hear as you fall asleep at the old Lycoming House is the throb of its heart. That is the great engine of the Susquehanna Iron Works, muttering—

Wrought iron

Wrought iron

Wrought iron

It never stops.

II

When in 1789 Gen. Aaron Z. Woolwine founded this place all the best Palestinian names, such as Philadelphia, Lebanon and Bethlehem, were already taken in Pennsylvania, so he called it New Damascus; and this name when he thought of it was perfect. The Damascenes were famous artificers in metal. He imagined even a geographical resemblance,—a plain bounded on one side by a river and on the other three by mountains representing the heights of Anti-Lebanon.

He resolved a city and that its character should be Presbyterian, and entered in his diary a prophecy. With ore, coal and limestone in Providential propinquity, with a river for its commerce to walk upon and with that spirit of industry which he purposed to teach and exemplify, aye, if necessary to require, New Damascus should wax in the sight of the Lord, partake of happiness and develop a paying trade.

Besides capital and imagination he brought to this undertaking a partner, three sons and a new wife.

For thirty years he fathered New Damascus. He saw it become the most important point of trade between Philadelphia and Wilkes-Barre, with five notable inns, two general supply stores, three tanneries, six grist mills, two lumber mills and the finest Presbyterian conventicle in that part of the state. The river was a disappointment. It was high and swift in flood and very low in the dry season, all very well for lumbering and seasonal traffic, but not a true servant of steady commerce. To bring the canal to New Damascus he entered politics and continuously thereafter represented his county in the legislature. He did not live to see the rise of the iron industry. That was left to the wonder of the next generation.

One of the disasters of his old age was with stone coal, the name by which anthracite was first known. All the coal around New Damascus was anthracite. For all that could be made of it commercially it might as well have been slate or shale. Nobody knew how to burn it. The fuel of industry was soft coal, which ignites easily; and wood was burned in open grates, not in New Damascus only but everywhere at this time; and as anthracite or hard coal would not burn in the same furnace and grates that burned either soft coal or wood people were sure it would not burn at all. General Woolwine knew better. Wherever he went he carried with him samples of hard coal, even in his saddle bags, begging people to try it, but the notion against it was too strong to be overcome by propaganda. Only time and accident could do that. Once he freighted a large quantity to Philadelphia, resolved to make it burn in some of the large forges there. The result was a dismal failure. Others before him on the same crazy errand had been arrested for obtaining money under false pretences, selling black stone as coal, and the prejudice was irreducible. He abandoned the stuff in Philadelphia; it was broken up and spread in walks. Later,—too late to benefit him,—the secret of burning anthracite in furnaces was discovered by accident. A perverse foundryman, who believed less in hard coal than in the probability that what everybody disbelieved was for that reason true, spent a whole day trying to make a fire of it. Then he left it in disgust and went home to supper. Returning some hours later he found an amazing fire,—hotter than any soft coal fire he had ever seen. The secret, beyond having a strong draught, was to let it alone. In a little while everybody was saying that you could burn stone coal if only you let it alone. That simple bit of knowledge, derived from trial and error, was worth more to Pennsylvania than a thousand gold mines.

In the last few years of his life General Woolwine, by his efforts to exploit stone coal and in various schemes of the imagination, lost a considerable part of his fortune by not attending to it. He was not a sound man of business in that sense. Ideas obsessed him. The idea that stone coal would burn was an obsession on which he made large outlays of time and money. He pursued the idea to failure. A more practical man would have first invented a grate suited to the fuel. A more conservative, selfish man would have sat on his anthracite beds until someone else had invented a grate. Yet he was never discouraged. The day before he died he wrote in his diary:

“As I lay down this life I am moved to reflect on its beauty and fulness to me. I have used up my strength in works. Nothing have I withheld from the Lord. I have walked in the faith. I have imagined civilization in a wilderness. Then I have seen it with my eyes.”

That was all he said of New Damascus. Other memories crowded in.

“In 1774,” he wrote, “I married a pious, sensible woman, who bore me two sons. In 1781 I married an eminent, worthy woman, who bore me a third son. In 1788 I married a delightful, affectionate woman, whom God was pleased to spare me to the end. She bore me my one daughter, Rebecca.”

The two sons by the first wife were already dead. This he did not mention in his testimony. The third son, born of the eminent and worthy woman, was at this time thirty-seven and unmarried, unlikely to perpetuate the line or to grace it if he did. All the Woolwine vitality went into Rebecca, born of his union with the delightful affectionate woman. Rebecca had married Phineas Breakspeare, the inn keeper, and was for a long time estranged from her father on that account. He forgave her on the head of a grandson, his namesake, Aaron Breakspeare.

The founder’s affairs were left in a somewhat involved condition. Everyone was surprised that the estate was not greater. His partner had large claims upon it and the accounts were in confusion.

The widow survived the General but one year. The third son died the next year. The whole estate then passed to Rebecca, who had buried her inn keeper; she held it in trust for the founder’s grandson, Aaron.

Here ends the Woolwine line. The name disappears suddenly from the annals of the county.

III

Nowhere in the annals of the county nor in those lymphatic biographical histories, quarto, half or full leather, profusely illustrated with steel engravings, which adorn the bookshelves of posterity, is there any mention of General Woolwine’s partner and man of business. This was Christopher Gib, cold, and logical, with a large broad face, dull blue eyes, a long bleak mouth line and a hard apple chin. People feared him instinctively. He inspired them with dread, anxiety and a sense of injury; yet in practical matters, especially in great emergencies, he commanded their utmost confidence. Those who complained of his oppression were certain to have been weak or wrong. That made no difference,—or made it worse. In every dispute he was technically, legally, perhaps morally right. By all the rules of law his acts were blameless. Nevertheless they outraged that subtle sense of the heart, higher than the sense of right and wrong, to which human conduct is referred for ultimate judgment. He acquired his rights fairly. His way of making a bargain was to let the party of the second part propose the terms. Then he would say yes or no, and that was final. Higgling disgusted him. But having made a bargain he insisted upon it in a relentless, dispassionate manner. No one could say he was unjust. But from one who is never unjust you shall not expect generosity. Human beings do not crave justice; they accept it. What they long for is understanding through sympathy. Christopher Gib had no chemistry of sympathy. It was left out of him. Therefore he had no emotional understanding of people and people had no rational understanding of him. His tragedy was invisible. He was denied what he could not give, namely, bread of the sweetened loaf without price, for which everyone hungers. Contempt for all the sentimental aspects of life was the self-saving device of his ego. He treated people as children. The more they disliked him the more bitterly he took his due.

He was ten years younger than General Woolwine and dominated the elder man in all their joint affairs, as a rational nature may dominate a romantic one. They quarreled a great deal;—one in a low, cynical voice; the other in loud, righteous tones. These disagreements were private. Outwardly to the end they maintained an appearance of unbroken amity. As to his ideas the old founder was immovable and pursued his own way. In matters of business he would sooner yield than continue the argument. One neglected business; the other lived for it. As the Woolwine estate declined that of Gib increased. There was no inequity in this. It was inevitable. The General drew out his profits and spent them; Gib reinvested his in undertakings outside the partnership. At the beginning the coal and iron lands were divided between them in the proportions of one-third and two-thirds, according to the amounts of capital respectively invested. The one-third was Gib’s share. In the end the proportions were exactly reversed. The Woolwine estate owned one-third and Gib two-thirds. It was all perfectly correct and legal.

At the age of fifty Gib married Sarah, of the Withy family, that came from New Jersey and built the first grist mill in New Damascus. Sarah was a dutiful, reconciled woman of strong, uncomplaining fibre, who could not fold her hands until the work was done. She never understood her husband. He never understood her. It wasn’t necessary. She was thirty-five and had once loved a young man who never even suspected it.

Of this inarticulate union came one son, named Enoch, born on the same day with Aaron Breakspeare, Rebecca’s child, grandson of the founder.

Christopher Gib lived fifteen years more, growing steadily richer and more misunderstood. Then he built himself a tomb, the walls of which were three feet thick, reinforced with bar iron, and died in the night alone.

IV

Aaron Breakspeare, grandson of the founder, and Enoch, son of Christopher Gib, being of the same age, inheriting parallel estates in a town realized from a joint impulse of their forbears, grew up together. They were never friends. They were rivals, unable to conceal or control their rivalry, the essence of which was antagonism. But they were inseparable. They could not let each other alone. Enoch was the stronger physically. In their earliest games and contests his object was to make Aaron say, “I quit.” And Aaron would sooner die than say it. In this strife Enoch had always the advantage of a definite, aggressive purpose. He created the occasions. Instinctively he knew that the way to save oneself in a trial of endurance is to keep one’s mind not on one’s own discomfort but on the agony of one’s adversary.

Aaron’s power was of pride and spirit. He would never say quit, no matter how much it hurt to go on, and when he was beaten he did not complain. Once Enoch invented a way of locking their arms so as to exert a mutual and very painful torsional leverage, perhaps enough to break the bones. The game was that each should go as far as the other could stand it. All the other had to do was to say enough. It was fairly played. But the word was never uttered and Aaron went home with a broken arm.

The imponderable values of life,—admiration, sympathy, sudden friendships, understanding, liking and being liked,—belonged to Aaron as by right. He was that kind of being toward whom the heart yearns for no reason but its own. Men and women loved him without knowing why. The people of New Damascus spoke of him with possessive affection and worldly misgiving; he would do himself no good, they said. That means whatever you make of it.

Enoch, pretending to be contemptuous, was secretly torn with envy. People looked at him and said: “The spit image of his father.” He had many of old Christopher’s facial expressions, especially one that was unnatural and very disconcerting. Anger or any strong adverse emotion caused the face to appear to be smiling. It wasn’t; nor was the expression assumed as a mask. The effect was accidental, produced by some peculiarity in the action of the retractor muscles. He was by nature more saturnine than his father, or perhaps it was only that he more indulged the impulse to cruelty. At fifteen he was already feared by his elders for what he might say.

His character developed in a true line. The traits of his youth became only more pronounced as he grew up. To take the pride out of Aaron became almost a passion. He delighted to expose his frailties and limitations. Aaron bought a fast horse. Enoch hating horses bought a faster one and drove it to death. Aaron on a dare swam the river at flood, which was thought a fine feat. Enoch swam it with his legs tied.

Aaron apparently did not mind. If he suspected the envious motive in Enoch’s conduct he never spoke of it, but generously applauded the other’s triumphs. Whatever else happened their intimacy remained unbroken. This seemed to be no more of one’s seeking than the other’s. Those of their own generation wondered, but the elders, hearing it spoken of, said it was no more strange than the way General Woolwine held with Christopher to the end of his days, though it more than half ruined him.

They went to the same school at Philadelphia. Enoch worked just hard enough to beat Aaron in everything except mathematics and popularity, and spent a great deal of his leisure prowling about the iron foundries. They fascinated him. There was iron in the blood of his family. His grandfather and great-grandfather had been smiths in England. And his father had laid upon him one injunction, which was never to part with an acre of ore or coal land, for some day these undeveloped possessions would make him rich. Then secretly he took up the study of metallurgy.

Yet it was Aaron who proposed to Enoch that they should pool their interests in ore and coal and found an iron industry at New Damascus. This fatal thing happened sometime between midnight and dawn after a disastrous twin celebration of their twenty-first birthday with a party of friends at Fingerboard Inn.

Aaron’s mood was sentimental. He felt a great twinge for Enoch, because of what occurred at the party. He himself was the one to blame. First he had demanded of his friends, when he heard what they were doing, that they should invite Enoch, too, as an equal guest; then with great difficulty, he had persuaded Enoch to come. It was bound to be dismal. Only one of Aaron’s reckless spontaneity could have imagined otherwise.

An archaic, mystical man rite survives in the panegyric supper. The root is hero worship. The impulse is exacting, jealous and sacrificial. Its chosen object, according to the rules, must submit to be clothed in the colors of perfection, set upon a pedestal and gorged with praise until he is purple. As the hero’s embarrassment rises his makers become more solemn and egregious, until suddenly with rough hands they drag their colossal effigy down and embrace it and everything, itself included, dissolves in maudlin ecstasy.

Obviously two human objects cannot be equally inflated in this manner at once. The impulse cannot divide itself. If it tried, no matter with what pains of tact, the effort would fall.

Having invited Enoch, whom they all disliked, Aaron’s friends felt acquitted toward him, and then, knowing how he hated to see Aaron preferred, they carried praise of Aaron to a point grotesque. As the wine flowed they became heedless and took delight in Enoch’s chagrin. No toast was drunk to him; his name was not mentioned. It was cruel but not premeditated. He ought not to have come. Aaron was ashamed to look at him.

Enoch, from having been at first merely bored, turned hot with anger, thinking the situation had been purposely created to humiliate him. He did not suspect Aaron of conscious part in that design; he blamed him, however, for having lent himself to it unwittingly. Hitherto convivialities had depressed and disgusted him. Now in the bitterness of his heart he made a judgment concerning them, that they were utterly beneath him; and made also a resolution which endured to the end of his life. That was to accept once for all the fact of people’s dislike and turn it against them.

Was he not stronger than any of these who presumed to belittle him? One by one he passed them through a test. There was not one he could not break in any trial of mind or body. Perhaps it was for that reason they disliked him. No matter why. He did not return the feeling in kind. They were not important enough to call forth from him either dislike or hatred. They merited only his indifference. That put them in their right place. He would be indifferent to them so long as they stood out of his way. If they came in his path he would break them indifferently. His mind became cold and glittering. He no longer cared whether anyone liked him or not. But they should never be indifferent toward him. He would attend to that. They should fear him. That was it. He would rather be feared than liked.

With these self-saving thoughts he had become absent and oblivious when suddenly on both sides he was nudged to rise, join hands, and sing to the hero. He rose, but instead of joining hands he rapped heavily on the table for attention. There was much surprise at this. Everyone stared at him in silence.

“Gentlemen,” he said, with the astonishing effect of a cold, sober voice, “I call your attention to an unfortunate omission. I propose that we shall drink to Aaron Breakspeare’s ancestors,—to the man but for whom there would be no New Damascus nor any one of us here present, and to the woman without whose assistance even that great pioneer would be now entirely forgotten. We shall drink, I say, to Aaron Breakspeare’s distinguished ancestors,—to Adam and Eve, if you please.”

There was a sound of embarrassed laughter. It immediately broke down. Gib was holding up his glass. His expression was sneering. He had paid them off, going just far enough to do so cleanly, yet not so far as to give actionable offence. For a long awkward moment they could not think either how to turn it back on him or redeem their own conduct from the ludicrous light in which he had placed it. Then Gearheart, who was taking law, he who afterward became a great jurist in the state, lifted his glass and spoke in a calm, judicial manner.

“Mr. Gib is right,” he said. “We regret the omission. Let us drink to Adam and Eve.”

So they did and that ended the party. Nobody disliked Gib less; everyone respected him more.

Aaron, who by this time was feeling very miserable, made a point of walking off with him. He wished to speak of what had happened. Yet what could he say that would not recognize the fact of Enoch’s humiliation? There was no way to speak tactfully of it. Still he could not let it alone.

“I’m sorry,” he said, blurting it out.

“For what?” Enoch inquired dryly.

“I’m afraid you had a wretched time. I’m to blame for getting you into it.”

“Not at all,” said Enoch. “To the contrary, I’m indebted to you for the most profitable evening of my life.”

He meant this. Those emotions of anger and mortification from which he had suffered so bitterly seemed now remote and insignificant. They had been swallowed up in a sense of deliverance. He had delivered himself from the torment of being disliked. The fact was unchanged, but he no longer cared. Therefore it had lost its right to oppress him. From this sudden birth of indifference he derived a feeling of solitary power. His mind was disenthralled. His whole outlook upon life was altered. For the first time he did not wonder whether Aaron really liked him or not, or how much, since it did not matter in the least. And also for the first time he did not dislike Aaron. His indifference included everyone, and it was sweet.

Aaron misunderstood the nature of Enoch’s placidity. He thought it a kind of sublime generosity and felt deep remorse. He would not have believed it was in him to take a hurt to his pride so magnanimously. He was wrenched with a sudden desire to offer some sign or token of durable amity. So it was that as in one the well of friendship dried up in the other it overflowed.

They walked for some time in silence. On the first eminence east of the town their ways parted. There Christopher Gib had built the dark iron-stone house which was still Enoch’s home. The Woolwine mansion where Aaron lived was higher up. Enoch would have turned his way, leaving it as usual for Aaron to say goodnight; Aaron detained him by the arm.

They stood for several minutes with their faces averted, gazing alternately at the stars that were God’s, at the mountains that were theirs, and at the town beneath them, showing in silhouette against the moon-lacquered river, a dream of their forebears realized. It was a beautiful night. Their thoughts ran together. Both were stirred by a vague sense of freedom, knowledge and responsibility. Each had that day come into the possession of his estate. It was Enoch who spoke.

“What will you do with yours?” he asked.

Until this moment Aaron had never once thought what he should do with it. But at the sound of Enoch’s voice asking the question so bluntly a complete idea crystallized in his mind. It had clarity and perspective, like a vision, and sudden as it was he felt very familiar with it.

“Look, Enoch,” he said. “There is the New Damascus we grew up with. How still it lies in the moonlight! How permanent it looks! Yet when we were born it was not here. Before we die it will have disappeared. In its place will be a city that shall walk out of those mountains,—a city of furnaces, full of roaring and the clangor of metal, flaming and smoking to heaven. Your father and my grandfather imagined it. They could not themselves bring it to pass. It was not for their time. They left it for us to do. We have a destiny here. Let’s take it together. Let’s form a partnership and found an iron industry.”

“That’s what I am intending to do,” said Enoch. “Not the partnership. I was not thinking of that. But the iron business,—I’ve had that in mind all the time. I’ve made a study of it.” After a pause he added: “I didn’t know your thoughts turned that way. You never spoke of it before.”

“You never mentioned it, either,” said Aaron. “You would prefer to go alone?”

“The idea of a partnership is new to me,” said Enoch.

“But wouldn’t it be advantageous to develop our ore and coal holdings jointly? They lie together.”

“Yes,” said Enoch, “I can see that.”

“Is it only the newness of the idea that bothers you?”

“I would not have entertained the thought as my own,” he said. “Since it comes from you I do not reject it. I merely do not wish to be responsible for it. You are not a man for business. Your father was not. Your grandfather distinctly was not. You would do better in law or politics. Still, as you say, there’s an obvious advantage in bringing all the properties together. We’ll talk about it to-morrow if you like. It’s on your initiative, remember.”

“Let’s agree on the main point now and leave the details,” said Aaron. “I’ll take my chances with business.”

He held out his hand. Enoch took it slowly. They looked at each other steadily in the moonlight.

“Is it agreed?”

“Yes,” said Enoch.

Then they said goodnight.

V

Enoch’s misgivings notwithstanding, the partnership of Gib & Breakspeare was very successful. This was owing partly to the ripeness of the opportunity and perhaps even more to the sagacity with which Enoch allotted to Aaron the tasks that were suited to his temperament. They put in equal amounts of capital and pooled their ore and coal lands on a royalty basis. Enoch was the dominant partner by right of knowledge and force of doggedness. He had studied the business. He took the manufacturing end and spent the whole of his time in New Damascus. Aaron took the selling end and made all the outside contacts.

It was easy to open the mines. That kind of work was already well understood in Pennsylvania.

Building a blast furnace was much more of an undertaking. It was in fact a daring adventure. Older and wiser heads had left it to the foolhardiness of youth.

Hitherto iron had been produced in this country, as elsewhere in the world, by primitive methods. Ore was wastefully smelted in rude charcoal furnaces unimproved in design since the Middle Ages. The process was of great antiquity. It was uniform in India at the time of Alexander’s invasion. Its origin even then was lost in myth. Tubal Cain, “an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron,” was master of it in the city of his distinguished ancestor, Cain, which was in the land of Nod.

Between the old iron master of the Himalayas, 1,500 years before Christ, with his little clay oven resembling an overturned pot, urging the fire with a bellows clasped in his arms—(a bellows made from the skin of a goat stripped from the animal without ripping the belly part, then tied at the leg holes, fitted with a wooden nozzle at the neck and stopped with an air valve in the tail orifice)—the difference between him and the iron master if the early 19th century was only that the latter had learned to build his forge of rude masonry and to make nature blow his fire.

The prize in both cases was a nugget of glowing iron, the most useful non-digestible substance yet discovered by man. It is tenacious, ductile, easily tempered, malleable at red heat, marriageable at white heat and possesses one miraculous quality. It is magnetic. It calls electricity out of the void, snares it, delivers it helpless into the hands of man. Without this blackhearted substance, fallen from the sun, natively pure only in form of a meteorite, lightning could not have been captured and enslaved on earth.

The glowing nugget on the forge hearth, called the loup or bloom, is in a crystalline condition. It is removed and further refined by hammering, drawing and rolling at red heat. It may be hammered by hand on an anvil, or beaten under a trip-hammer, or rolled between rollers. The effect of this treatment is to elongate the crystals into tough fibres.

A blast furnace differs from a forge not in principle so much as in audacity, method and degree. The forge pricks nature and extracts iron one molten drop at a time. The blast furnace cuts a gash in her side and extracts iron in a blazing stream.

There were blast furnaces before those of Gib and Breakspeare, in England, Germany and France, but they were few and still in the stage of wonder. They were very costly to build, many failed for unknown reasons, and the conservative old iron masters stuck to the forge. Nowhere had a blast furnace been worked with anthracite or stone coal. All that had so far succeeded used wood, charcoal, bituminous coal and coke. The fuel at New Damascus was anthracite.

So it was in all respects a rash experiment and in one respect unique. The partners were sure of the theory. The thing was scientifically feasible. Yet in practice it might fail for want of handiness with a strange process or because of some malicious chemical enemy lurking in the elements to be acted upon. And failures in iron experiments are ruinous. Nothing ever can be saved and the capital outlay will have been enormous.

The skill to build such a blast furnace as they required was not only dear and hard to find: when found it was pessimistic and disbelieving and disclaimed all responsibility for the outcome because it was something that had never been done before. Expert iron workers to man the process were of the same grey mindedness about it.

These iron workers had to be imported from England under guarantees and inveiglements. Nearly all the new iron working methods of that time originated in England and were as jealously guarded as military secrets. The rise of American industry against European competition was greatly hampered by lack of industrial knowledge. Europe would not part with it, or share it, since to possess it exclusively gave her manufacturers a world-wide advantage. So it had to be obtained surreptitiously. Much of it was smuggled out in the heads of English, Scotch and Welsh artisans who could be bribed to evade the embargo upon the emigration of skilled workmen and try their luck in the United States.

While Enoch worked indefatigably at New Damascus, tapping the mountains and preparing the mule roads by which to drain away their coal and ore and limestone, Aaron was abroad impressing the skill that should convert those raw materials into iron.

Two years from the time they started, one evening, the first miniature volcano went into action.

That precisely is what a blast furnace is. The hollow, cylindrical furnace is the mountain cone, charged from the top with fuel, iron ore and limestone flux. The mass is fired at the bottom. The gases go off at the top in flame and smoke, an upside-down cataract of lost affinities, giddy, voluptuous, hungry and free. An odd circumstance has released them from the cold inert embrace in which they have lain for ages of years. Cinders and gross matter flow away below as lava. The iron, seeking itself, falls like rain into the hearth at the bottom and runs out on the sand, forming there a molten lake. Around the edges of this lake, taking off from it, is a series of moulded depressions. The lake drains into these depressions. They suck it dry. Ironworkers call the lake the sow. The forms that appear in the depressions, having devoured the sow completely, are called the pigs. The product is pig iron,—a lump of rough metal the size of a man’s thigh.

After the fire is lighted at the bottom there is nothing to do for several hours but wait. In this interval the partners went to supper at Enoch’s house. They ate in silence. Aaron made several ineffectual attempts at conversation. Their thoughts were far apart. One was thinking of details, of faults to be remedied, of errors in the next instance to be avoided; the other dwelt upon the achievement as a dramatic whole. Enoch was anxious to get back.

At a point from which the blast furnace was visible as a complete spectacle Aaron stopped and seized him by the arm.

“Take a look at it, man. There’s plenty of time for that.”

A blast furnace even then was what a blast furnace is,—the most audacious affront man has yet put upon nature. He decoys the elemental forces and gives them handy nicknames. Though he cannot tame them, he may control them through knowledge of their weaknesses. He learns their immutable habits. From the Omnipotent Craftsman he steals the true process. In the scale of his own strength he reproduces in a furnace the conditions under which the earth was made, and extracts from the uproar a lump of iron.

By the very majesty of the effects he conjures up he is himself absurdly diminished, to the point of becoming incredible. As you look at him he is neither impressive nor august. Perhaps if one had witnessed the creation the appalling effects in the same way would have seemed much more wonderful than the Creator. In His old clothes, anxious, preoccupied, intent upon results, He probably had been very disappointing to the eye.

From where he stood, detaining Enoch against his mood, Aaron could see the workers moving about the furnace hearth,—tiny, impish figures, grotesquely insignificant, scornfully manipulating the elemental intensities. The surrounding slopes were lined with people, their faces reflecting a dull, lurid glow; and there was an ominous, swooning vibration in the air.

“Admit it, Enoch,” he said, “You get a thrill from that.”

“I want to get back,” said Enoch.

They remained at the furnace the whole of that night and handled the first cold pig iron.

“It’s good,” said Enoch.

It was a fine quality of pig iron. The demand for it was immediate and profitable. Furnaces were added one or two at a time until there were eight. Pig iron was for some time the sole product. The mill to draw and roll the iron came later.

In five years the population of New Damascus trebled. The mines, the blast furnaces and later the drawing mill,—the first in this country to pass iron through rollers,—employed thousands of workers. Their wants made business. The town was rebuilt. That made more business. Enoch on his own venture built houses for the iron workers and opened a large company store.

There was a third reason why the partnership, to everyone’s surprise, was successful as a relationship between two antagonistic natures.

Aaron had all the popularity still. The social life of New Damascus centered upon him. The Woolwine mansion where he lived in bachelor eminence was full of entertainment and gaiety. His hospitality was memorable. Guests came from afar, from Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New York, to attend his parties.

Enoch continued to live morosely in the old iron-stone house below. The contrast was notable, even painful, but if Enoch minded at all there were compensations. Within the partnership and outside of it his power increased. There was never any doubt as to which of them exercised ultimate authority in matters of business. When it came to borrowing capital, as they did to build the mill, it was Enoch’s word that persuaded the lenders. He made a sound they understood,—a crunching, horizontal sound that was not in Aaron at all. The instinct that preferred Aaron in friendship and the instinct that preferred Enoch in business could exist, and did, in the same people. Enoch was preferred where his vanity was. People feared and trusted him. That kept the scales even.

VI

Having heard of New Damascus that it was marked to become the seat of the American iron industry, there appeared at this time one Bruno Mitchell, a capitalist, thinking to open a bank if the repute of the place should prove to be well founded. He had prospered in New England, where the practice of banking was already well advanced; but he believed in the star of iron and it led him hither. In his active character he was hard and avaricious, yet there was a quaintness about him that first contradicted that fact and then mitigated one’s opinion of it. He had never filled his skin, or perhaps it was a size too large in the taking. Instead of hanging loosely, as an over-size skin does on wavering natures, it had shrunk to measure, so that he was prematurely wrinkled and had a leathery look. His face wore a quizzical expression. His eyes were blue and restless. He walked softly.

Enoch Gib impressed him deeply. They understood each other at sight.

Persuaded by omens and discoveries that New Damascus was the place, Mitchell moved himself there, together with all his means and chattels and a daughter named Esther. He was an important addition to the community. He gave it the prestige of having one of the first banks west of Philadelphia. To Gib and Breakspeare he was very helpful. Not only did he discount their bills and effect payments on their account at distant points in a manner then new and miraculous; he also advanced them considerable sums of credit and capital. He was anxious to make a permanent investment in the business, and Enoch was willing that he should. Aaron objected, as he had a right to do, and although both Enoch and Mitchell were disappointed, there was no open feeling about it.

Esther Mitchell was twenty-four. Since the death of her mother five years before she had lived alone with her father, who took it each day for granted that she should be content to manage his household until whatever it is that happens to women happened to her. They never spoke of it and nothing happened. So time wore on. Once in a while he said to himself, “I wonder why Esther never has a beau,” and then put it out of his mind. They behaved toward each other like two married people who run in parallel grooves and never touch.

When at the death of his wife the daughter returned to him from a convent school he hardly knew her. She was still, after five years, as much a stranger to him as on the day she voluntarily assumed the responsibilities of her mother. He never had been able to penetrate her reserve. When he tried, as he did at first, he had a sense of trespassing and guiltily retired. She had a way of looking at things, at people, at him, with steady, wide-open eyes that never betrayed what she was thinking. Sometimes a troubled expression would appear in them, like the shadow of a cloud on the surface of a still blue pool. They talked very little. What there was of it was friendly. He had no idea what she did with her own time, if she had any, and never asked.

As a housekeeper she was faultless. As the female adjunct of an elderly, selfish engrossed man she had all the merits and none of the liabilities of a perfect wife; besides she was in youth and sweet to the eye. As a fellow human being she was a riddle. In that light he knew hardly more than her name. Her castle was invisible. There was no straight way to it. The outermost signs were all misleading.

The partners were frequent visitors in the Mitchell household. The atmosphere was social. The subject was business. They seldom talked of anything else. Business of course has many facets. It was not merely the affairs of Gib and Breakspeare they discussed. They debated the future of iron, metallurgical processes, the blundering stupidity of Congress.

The feud between politics and business was never new. An economic truth more obvious than daylight to the industrial founders was even then a tangle of obscurities to Congress. What statesmen could not see clearly, once for all, was that without high tariff protection the American iron industry would live at the mercy of foreign competitors. On that text Enoch said always the last word, which was his own, and became a famous slogan among the ironmongers of that generation. It was this:

“War or tariff.”

That now sounds cryptic. Then it was clear enough. Everybody knew or could remember that there was no iron working in this land before the war of Independence. The mother country forbade it. What she wanted from the American colonists was the raw material to be worked up in her own iron mills with her own skilled labor, for if the colonists produced iron manufactures for themselves English exports to the New World would suffer. An act of the British Crown decreed that “no mill or other engine for slitting or rolling of iron, no plating forge to work with a tilthammer and no furnace for making steel” should be erected “in any of His Majesty’s Colonies in America.” Mills already existing were declared a public nuisance and abated as such.

So the colonists, forbidden to work their own iron, were obliged to sell their raw materials to England and buy it back from British merchants in the form of manufactures. The war cut the colonies off from these British manufactures. They were thereupon obliged by necessity to found a native iron working industry. After the war the British sent their products to the United States at prices with which the new American industrialists could not successfully compete, hence the demand that British iron be excluded, or at least that the importation of it be penalized by high tariff. This was the historic experience that caused the prosperity, in fact the life, of the early American iron industry to be associated with war and tariff. They were in results the same. War had all the effects of a high tariff. It kept the foreign stuff out.

“And nobody wants war,” Enoch would add.

Another topic endlessly debated was the railroad. It had just come within range of practical vision. What were its possibilities? Would it supplement or supersede canals? Enoch could not imagine that the railroad would ever take the place of canals. Aaron thought it would. Mitchell thought with Aaron, and Enoch for that reason was more rigid in his opinion.

Once Aaron broke all precedent in this private chamber of commerce by saying suddenly to Esther:

“What do you think?”

He had been observing her for some time. Through all their interminable repetitious dinner table talk she maintained an air of rapt attention, with her gaze on the one who was speaking, and never uttered a word. He wondered if she were listening or merely watching them. Both her father and Enoch were surprised that anyone should address her with that kind of question. She was not startled.

“I wonder which will make the world happier,” she said.

In the way she said it there was a kind of disbelieving that referred neither to canals nor railroads but to something represented by the discussion. The effect was strange. All three men were disturbed in their sense of importance. They attacked her in concert, with a condescending manner, Enoch leading. How like a woman to think that way! What had happiness got to do with it? The question was economic. Which would be the more efficient means of transportation? But anyhow—this was Enoch—anyhow, was it not obvious that whatever increased the wealth of the world increased also the sum of human happiness?

“Is it?” said Esther.

They could get nothing more out of her. She declined to be argued with and smiled at them from a great distance. Her smile was impassable.

Several times after that Aaron tried to involve her in their conversations, at dinner, or in the drawing room where she sat apart with her needlework, but never again with any success. She would look at him with a bothered expression, and either recognize his effort by no other sign or slowly shake her head. This he took for disapproval and thereafter ignored her, as the others did, except now and then to scrutinize her in a surreptitious manner. When she surprised him at that she returned his gaze with distant, impersonal curiosity, until he was the first to turn away.

A change took place gradually in the partners’ relations with the Mitchell menage. Aaron’s visits were no less recurring, but Enoch’s became more frequent and regular. It was the only household in New Damascus in which he felt wholly at ease with himself and properly esteemed. He seldom went anywhere else. Very soon the women people were saying they knew what the attraction was. A certain expectation began to crystallize. Enoch became aware of it, not knowing how. Mitchell cultivated it adroitly. Since his offer to invest capital in the business of Gib and Breakspeare had been declined the idea of marrying Esther to one of the firm took possession of his thoughts. His preference was for Enoch because more securely through him than through Aaron would the Mitchell chariot be hitched to the star of iron. He talked of both of them to Esther, with an air of being impartial, as if giving her his intimate, unguarded impressions. As he understood women, their minds worked on these matters in a contrary manner. To disparage Aaron might be prejudicial to his ends. He never did that. Nevertheless, Enoch came off by every comparison as much the superior person. Esther listened attentively and said nothing.

“Do you ever think of getting married?” he asked her. “I sometimes wonder.”

“No,” she said. “I never have. Why do you ask it?”

“But you may,” he said.

“Have you some one in view for me?” In her voice was a certain elusive tone, unresolved between doubt and irony, that he knew and hated. It made him uneasy. Sometimes it made him feel small.

“Seriously, I have,” he replied. “That is to say, I have hoped you might become interested that way in Enoch Gib. You know what I think of him. He will be a great man in this country if nothing happens.”

“Does it much concern your happiness?” she asked. There was that tone again.

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” he said. “I am thinking of your future. It would give me a sense of great comfort.”

This was at dinner’s end one evening when they were alone. As he talked, with his eyes down, he traced a figure on the table cloth with a spoon, making it deeper and deeper as his unease increased. He felt all the time that she was regarding him with a wide, impenetrable expression.

“Oh,” she said, after an interval of silence.

He started and looked at her furtively. She was regarding him freely. There was in her expression the trace of an ambiguous, amused smile. He blushed and rose from the table.

Expectations increased. More marriages take place under the tyranny of expectation than Heaven imagines. New Damascus society became tensely expectant.

Enoch proposed, as Esther expected, with an air of bestowing himself where he was sure to be appreciated. She took some time about it and then accepted him.

Aaron was apparently the only person in New Damascus who had not foreseen it. He was deeply astonished. Why? It was not an improbable consummation. Yet it seemed to him strange and unnatural.

He first heard of it at dinner with the Mitchells. Enoch was present. Mitchell announced it as if Aaron were a large party of friends. He responded as such. There was a false note in his felicitations. He was aware of it; so was Esther. But in trying to cancel the impression he made it worse. Enoch was protected as by wool with a sense of proprietorship and self-satisfaction. Mitchell was insensitive.

Esther kept looking at Aaron. There was a troubled, startled expression in her eyes. He misread it for distaste. He had long imagined she disliked him. Several times that evening she was brief with him, almost curt, and this had never happened before.

His visits to the Mitchell house thereafter were formal and less frequent. Enoch’s manner of making himself paramount affected him disagreeably. And Esther’s behaviour perplexed him. She was at one time much more friendly than he expected and at another so deliberately indifferent that he could only conclude that she meant to estrange him.

Yet now a fatality began to operate. By a law of coincidence that we do not understand, and may not exist, they began to meet outside the household, purely, as it seemed in each case, by accident,—in unexpected places, on the street again and again, once at night in a crowd at an open air Punch and Judy show in which neither of them was at all interested, once in Philadelphia where he was transacting business and she was shopping with her maid, and once in a memorable way on a path through the woods to Throne Rock, a natural seat on the mountain summit from which the view of the valley was exciting.

It was a Sunday afternoon in early May. He was going; she was returning. They were at first surprised, then embarrassed, and became absurdly self-conscious. She wore a wide-brim hat, pulled down on both sides and tied under her chin. She was hot and tired; her color was high. Her dress was torn. He noticed it.

“I was after these,” she said, catching his glance. She held out a bunch of dogwood blossoms, with a gesture to share them. He admired them and there was nothing else to say. So they stood, she looking at him and holding out the dogwood flowers, he looking fixedly at them, until her arm dropped and she turned to go on. He let her go and went his way up the path. But he looked back. She had stopped and was seated on a fallen tree trunk. He returned. She did not look up.

“I’d like to give you a farewell party,” he said. “Will you come?”

“A farewell party?”

“There ought to be a better name for it,” he said. “A sour grape party, then. I’ve always wanted to give you a dinner at the mansion. Will you come?”

“Yes,” she said.

And again there was nothing else to say. She rose and he walked with her toward the town.

“If Enoch won’t mind,” he said.

“Why should he mind?” she asked.

“Perhaps he won’t,” said Aaron.

This thought, as to whether Enoch should mind, had far and separate projections in each of their minds and kept them silent until at the natural parting of their ways she turned to face him and held out her hand. It was a gesture of dismissal. He bowed and left her.

The dinner party took place just two weeks before her wedding day. It was perhaps too elaborate. It contained every preparable element of success. Aaron did his best to save it, and yet nobody enjoyed it. Esther was visibly depressed. Enoch sulked. The guests rallied them until it was seen to be hopeless and then let them alone. They simply could not react with gaiety.

Aaron as host had special rights in the guest of honor and took them. Enoch grew steadily worse. Opinion upon him was divided. Some thought it was the natural gloom of his nature and were full of foreboding for Esther. Others said they did believe the man was jealous.

After a dance Esther and Aaron walked on the terrace.

“Forgive me,” she said. “I have spoiled the party.”

“No,” he said. “It’s my fault. I knew better. Yet I couldn’t resist it. And it is in a sense a farewell party.”

“What does that mean?”

“After your wedding I may not see you again for a long time. I’m only waiting on Enoch’s account. Then I shall be going to Europe for a year, perhaps more.”

“On business?”

“Y-e-s,” he answered slowly.

They took several more turns without speaking.

“What are your plans?” he asked.

“None that I know of,” she said.

She had stopped. He saw that her gaze was directed at Enoch’s ancestral iron-stone house below. The fitful glare of the blast furnaces, lower down, lighted its sombre nakedness and gave it a relentless, sinister aspect. The windows, which were small and unsoftened by copings, were like cruel, ferocious eyes in a powerful, short-haired, suspicious animal.

“Shall you live there?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, giving him a frowning, startled look, as if he had surprised her at a disadvantage. She added: “Enoch took me through it yesterday. The room where he was born,—that will be mine. The room where his father died is just as it was then. He thinks we shouldn’t touch it.”

She shivered. He asked her if she was cold. She wasn’t, but on the next turn past the door she turned and they went in.

Enoch’s idea of marriage was inherited. You take a wife from the church to the ancestral abode and become jointly responsible with God for her past, present, future and hereafter, for her body, her mind, her way with the neighbors, for everything about her save the separate flame of her individuality. That is vanity. The house is yours, therefore she must accept it. It was yours before she had any rights in it, therefore she must get used to it, as she must get used to you. And why not? If Aaron married would he not take his wife to the Woolwine Mansion just as it was? Well, what was Aaron’s was like Aaron and what was Enoch’s was like Enoch, and what a woman married was what she got.

Enoch rode home with Esther that night in her father’s carriage. Mitchell had gone home earlier and sent the carriage back. As they were passing the iron-stone house—fatally then—Enoch asked:

“What do you and Aaron find to talk about?”

“Nothing,” she said.

That was literally the truth. It was with extreme difficulty that they found anything to say to each other. Never had they carried on an intimate, self-revealing conversation. There was too much constraint on both sides. But Enoch could hardly believe that Aaron was under any circumstances inarticulate, like himself. Or was it that he knew instinctively if what Esther said was true there lay in that very truth a deep significance?

Her answer made him seethingly angry. An ungovernable feeling rose up in him spirally. It was as an adder stinging him in the dark. He could not seize it, for he knew not what or where it was. He could not escape from it. The pain was horrible.

Esther knew nothing of these violent emotions. She had no more intuition of him than he had of her. That sense by which natures attuned exchange thoughts without words was impossible between them. Between Esther and Aaron it already existed: it always had. But it was unacknowledged.

Enoch passed three days without seeing Esther, hoping she might send for him. On the fourth day he went to dinner and she treated him as if nothing were the matter. She hardly knew there was. That made it much worse. Then he flourished the wound by pretending heroically to conceal it. That method will work only provided the woman cares and loves the child in her man. Esther did not care. She refused to discover the hurt. The man’s last recourse is to injure the woman, to ease himself by hurting her. Enoch became oppressive. He began to mention the things that should be rendered unto Cæsar, categorically, gratuitously; he revealed the laws of Gib; he appointed how the concavities of her life should correspond to the convexities of his; he spoke of penalties, forfeits and consequences, and of the ancient legal principle that ignorance of the statutes is no defence provided the statutes have been duly published. She listened with wide-open eyes. He believed he inspired her with admiration for the stern stuff he was made of, and thus blindly sought his fate.

So his hurt was revenged but in no wise healed.

On the eve of their wedding day, at dinner, Aaron’s name was pronounced. The invisible circumstances were tragic. Enoch happened at that instant to be regarding Esther with a sensation that was new to him and very disturbing. He knew not what to do with it. Suddenly he had been seized with a great longing for her, a yearning of the heart toward the fact of her being that was savage, tender and desolate. He wondered that Esther and her father both were not aware of this singular and dramatic occurrence. It shook him like an earth tremor. An impulse to speak, to shout, to cry out words of fantastic meaning, to rise and touch her, became almost uncontrollable,—almost. It occurred to him for the first time, like a blow, that he had never discovered her nature, her true self. He had not tried. The importance of doing so, the possibility of it, had not been thought of. But he would. He would begin all over again to get acquainted with her.

In that moment he loved her.

And it was then,—just then,—that he heard the sound of Aaron’s name. He could not say which one of them uttered it. The sound was all he knew. Instantly the hideous, stinging adder upraised from his depths and began striking at the walls of his breast. Vividly, stereoptically, as a series of pictures, there flashed across his mental vision every situation in which he had seen Aaron and Esther together.

He had been able to control the impulse of love to vent its untimely ecstasy; his rage he could not govern.

To Esther’s and her father’s amazement he began, with no apparent provocation whatever, to utter against Aaron defamations of an extreme and irrevocable character. His manner contradicted the violence of his feelings. It was self-possessed, one would almost say restrained; that was his way under stress of emotional excitement. At no point did he become incoherent. His words were chilled and came to him easily. One might have thought he was thinking out loud, very earnestly, in solitude. On his face was that singular Gib expression, never witnessed before in the Mitchell household,—the mouth contortion one mistook for a smile. So far as Esther and Mitchell could see the performance was gratuitous and premeditated. It had gone far before they realized that his state was one of passion. But that discovery had no mitigating value. They made no effort to stop him. He spoke of things that are supposed to be unmentionable, and of his private intentions, and closed abruptly with the declaration that Aaron should never be received in his house as a guest.

“Let that be understood,” he said to Esther. Then he rose from the table and departed.

Mitchell was stupefied. He looked slowly at Esther. Her face was a perfect mask.

“Do you know what it means?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“What? What?”

“It’s the only way Mr. Gib has of paying your daughter a compliment,” she said.

And now Bruno Mitchell suffered another shock. For the first time in her life Esther rose from the table and left him there.

She went to her room, sent her maid to bed, and sat for a long time perfectly still, at the core of a maelstrom, her emotions whirling and seething around her. They were her emotions. She recognized them as such. Only, they were outside of her. This had always been true. Even before she understood what it meant, her mother, a stoic, began to say: “Don’t give way to your feelings. They will swallow you up. Watch them. If you can see them they cannot hurt you.” So she had watched them fearfully. To do that she had to put them outside. She had seen them grow, change and rise until they engulfed her, and then the only way she could save herself was to give them that whirling motion, which caused them to incline from her, as the waters of the whirlpool incline from the center. But it was harder and harder to keep them whirling and she dared not stop, for if she did they would swallow her up.

The spectacle became awesome and fascinating, as a maelstrom is, and there were moments when the perverse impulse to stop, surrender, cast herself headlong away, was almost irresistible. She thought of this as equivalent to suicide. And she had for a long time secretly supposed it would ultimately happen. Now she was terrified and thrilled by a premonition that it was imminent. Never had the waters been so mad, so giddy, so nearly ungovernable, so excitingly desirable.

That is all she was thinking of,—if it may be called thinking,—as she started up, drew on walking boots, took a shawl and descended the stairs. In the hallway she met her father. He looked at her with surprise.

“Are you going out?”

“For a walk,” she said.

“But Esther! ... at this hour ... alone. I—”

“Yes,” she said, waiting. “Do you forbid it?”

There was a note in her voice he had never heard before. She wished him to say yes, he forbade it. That was why she asked the question. And if he had said that the whirling flood would have collapsed at once. That again was all she was thinking. It was a wild, liberating thought. But instead he took a step toward her and scrutinized her face.

“Esther, what has happened to you?”

“On the eve of my wedding, for the first and last time, for an hour perhaps, I shall be Esther herself, alone,” she said.

Since the unprecedented uproar of the inclined waters had begun an hour before she had not once thought of her wedding. The word of it, as now it came to her lips, seemed strange and fantastic, and yet she had made no resolve against it.

Her father stood aside and she passed out.

Half an hour later the knocker sounded and Mitchell himself went to the door, expecting to receive Esther. There was Enoch. He asked to see her.

“She has gone for a walk,” said Mitchell. “Won’t you come in and wait? She can’t be long returning.”

Enoch hesitated and turned away, saying he might have the good luck to meet her.

He had come to mend the impression he was conscious of having left behind him. At least that was the ostensible reason. That was what he would have said. The fact was that the adder had suddenly slunk away, and once more came that feeling for Esther which was so new and irrational and caused his heart to stagger back and forth. It was stronger than before,—stronger than pride. He could scarcely breathe for the ache of wanting to see her again that night....

Esther turned first toward the river path, changed her direction aimlessly, walked for some distance toward the limestone quarry, then suddenly swung around, passed the blast furnaces, and presently, only her feet aware of how they came there, she was high on the mountain path to Throne Rock. She had been walking too fast. Her breath began to fail. She sat on a log to rest. The moon came up. The log was the same fallen tree trunk on which she sat with her dogwood flowers the day Aaron turned round, came back, and invited her to a farewell dinner party. She knew it all the time. The scene restored itself, with all the feelings it had evoked, and she did not push them back. They detached themselves from the whirling mass and touched her. There was a moment in which she could not remember anything that had happened since; and in that moment, as an integral part of it, the figure of Aaron appeared, walking toward her from above, exactly as before.

She sat so still he might almost have passed her. He did not start. For a long time he stood looking at her. She did not move. He could not see her face. Then without speaking he sat beside her, at a little distance, on the log. The tree frogs informed on one another—peep-ing—peep-ing. A dry twig falling made a crashing sound. Far away below, at regular intervals, shrill whistle blasts denoted stages in the ring of smelting alchemies.

Aaron spoke.

“What day is tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” said Esther.

They were silent until the whistle blew again.

“At ten o’clock,” said Aaron.

“At ten o’clock,” said Esther.

The exchange of wordless thoughts went on and on, and Aaron was expecting what she said.

“I do not love him.”

“He loves you,” said Aaron.

“Does that so much oblige the woman?” Esther asked.

“The woman is obliged,” he said, “she is ... unless——” He stopped.

“Aaron,” she said, “tell me this. How do friends regard each other’s wives and sweethearts?”

“Sweethearts almost the same as wives,” he said.

“So that if one loved the sweetheart of a friend he could not tell her that?”

“No, he could not.”

“Not even if he knew the sweetheart did not love the friend?”

“No,” said Aaron.

“Then should the woman tell?”

“Tell whom?” asked Aaron, trembling.

“The friend ... the other man,” said Esther.

Aaron slowly dropped his head between his hands. She could feel his body shake. A roaring blackness filled her eyes. She rose and would have gone, but he enfolded her, with arms that touched her lightly, almost not at all at first, then tightened, tightened, tightened, until her life was crushed to his, and all the waters fell.

He put her off at arm’s length to see her better.

“Through all consequences ... forever ... to finality,” he said.

And she was satisfied.

How long they stood so, either thus or as it was, gazing one upon the other, with no words to say,—how long they never knew. A sound of footsteps very near broke their ecstasy, and there stood Enoch.

They had no sense of guilt. They were shy and startled from the shock of coming back to earth.

Enoch stood there looking at them. Aaron moved, drawing Esther’s form behind him.

At that Enoch turned away and laughed.

Twenty paces on his way he laughed again.

When he was out of sight he laughed.

At intervals all the way down the mountain he stopped to laugh.

The sound of his laughter reverberated, echoed, swirled, went and returned, filled the whole valley, blasting the night. Then when he was far off he uttered a piercing scream. It rose on the air like a rocket, hissed, burst with a soft splash and pitched off into space, and the world for a moment was deathly still. The tree frogs were the first to recover and began frantically to fill up the void.

Aaron touched Esther. They descended. She inquired of him nothing; he informed her of nothing. They did not speak again for hours. They walked to the Woolwine mansion. He called for horses, a light vehicle, and wraps. And all that night they drove, past the setting moon, into the darkness, through the dawn, toward Wilkes-Barre.

Next day at noon they were married.

VII

The partnership of Gib and Breakspeare was sundered.

Two weeks later, when Aaron returned to the little red office building across the road from the mill, he found on his desk a paper marked “Articles of Dissolution.” Attached was a note of two lines from Enoch, saying: “Let any changes proposed to be made herein appear in the form of writing, or through an attorney at law.”

They never spoke again.

The articles prepared by Enoch provided that the ore and coal lands, which had been pooled on a royalty basis, should release from that agreement and revert to their respective owners; that the eight blast furnaces should be divided equally, four and four; that Gib should buy from Breakspeare, for cash, his interest in the rolling mill, because it could not be divided, the price to be one-half the original cost, according to the books, and that all the money in the firm’s treasury, less current liabilities, should be halved on the date of signature.

Aaron read the paper once through, put it down and signed it. The terms were unfair. Yet he had no impulse to change them. They were unfair because nothing was made of those two intangible assets which sometimes in business are worth more than the physical properties—namely, spirit of organization and good will of trade—all of which would automatically belong to the one who bought out the other’s interest in the mill. This was so because the mill was now the crown of the business. What the firm sold was no longer pig iron, as at first, but wrought iron in standard bars manufactured from the pig by remelting, kneading, hammering and rolling it. The product of the blast furnaces, instead of going to market, only fed the mill.

What would Aaron do?

He could not sell the product of his blast furnaces to Enoch. Business transactions between them were unimaginable; besides, no sooner were the articles of dissolution signed than Enoch went about building four more blast furnaces of his own. That was to make himself independent of Aaron’s product. Aaron, therefore, might choose between seeking a market outside for his pig iron or building a mill to work it. To build a mill would require, first, a large outlay of capital, then an organization of expert workers and superintendents, and thirdly a market for his wrought iron in competition with the product of the established mill, now Enoch’s. For of course Enoch’s iron would continue to be called Damascus Iron, which was its trade name, and it was already famous in the country for its fine texture and purity. Aaron’s might be just as good, but it would have to take a new name and earn its own good will.

Well, but what he did was unexpected. He drew the fires from his blast furnaces and went to Europe with Esther.

It was more than a honeymoon, or less, as you may happen to think. In Aaron’s case romance and work were easily combined, for as love is an adventure of the spirit, so to a man of his temperament work is a romantic enterprise of the mind and creative in a manner less wonderful than the mysterious life process only because we take it for granted. What is an engine? a steamship? a blast furnace? a tower? It is the materialization in form and function of an idea itself imponderable. It is the psychic power of man exteriorized in substance and there is no accounting for such phenomena save that it happens. Who knows but the Gods are as much puzzled by that form of glow worm full of parasites that we call a railroad train as we are by the things of cosmic origin?

Specifically Aaron was in quest of a secret that had eluded and baffled iron masters always. They were sure it existed. That certainty was deducible from the data of knowledge. Many times they had almost touched it; then it was lost again, like a coy, tantalizing vision of loveliness, and the pursuers were discouraged. Still, they never gave up. Whoever found it would be made exceedingly rich and the iron industry at the same time would be revolutionized.

It is to be explained.

Everybody probably knows that in the first place all the iron was trapped in the blazing heart of the earth. It forms no part anywhere of the earth’s true granite crust. But it was rebellious and indigestible and had to be spewed up from the inflamed Plutonic belly through the tops of volcanoes. At that time volcanoes were near or under water generally, and when the molten iron came jetting forth in red lava streams a spectacular melodrama was enacted. Water was its adverse element. At the lava’s touch the oceans boiled, hissed, upheaved and draped themselves in steam. They were not hurt really; they were outraged.

What happened to the lava?

The water shivered it to atoms and cast it high upon the wind as dust and ashes.

In that free and irresponsible condition iron travelled far, made his bed in many places, took up with new and strange affinities,—the flapper sisters Chlorine, the Sulphur Gerties, the lazy Nitrate Susans, the harmless Silicates, a score of others known and unknown, and most of all with a comfortable, indispensable element called Oxygen. The extent and variety of his embracings may be imagined from the fact that he is never found in a state of unattached purity save now and then when he falls from the heavens as a meteorite. In these haphazard, bigamous earthly alliances he is of no avail to man. The problem is how to disentangle him,—how to divorce him from his undesirable affinities and wed him durably and in a lawful manner to those elements which supplement his power.

It becomes extremely complicated when you begin seriously to consider it. How shall one be divorced from many miscellaneous affinities? You have to have been regularly wedded in order to get divorced. Well, the only way is the long, pragmatic way. You wed him to the affinities that are to be legally got rid of and then divorce him from them.

Now take it: The iron ore is in the ore bed, embracing those other elements at random, particularly Oxygen. First you oxidize him by roasting. That is, you wed him to Oxygen; you give him Oxygen until he is sick of it. Then you melt him down with coal in a furnace to deoxidize him—to divorce him, that is to say, from his affinity Oxygen. It is the first fiery ordeal. But at the same time you wed him to Carbon. Thus deoxidized and carbonized, divorced and wedded by one stroke, he becomes pig iron.

The wedding with Carbon, however, is not permanent. It has been contracted so to speak under duress, a miserable makeshift, because his earthly nature is such that he must be wedded to something all the time. Besides, there is now too much Carbon for his own good. So you melt him again and divorce him from Carbon, by the unexpected method of blowing Oxygen through him. At the end of this second ordeal he is free of both Carbon and Oxygen, many other elements have disappeared also, and you have wrought iron, practically pure, limp and malleable.

Now suppose you want to make him hard. You want to convert him into steel. In that case you melt him a third time and wed him permanently to a small amount of Carbon, more or less, the amount to be governed by the degree of hardness required. That makes steel. But to make it has required one roasting and three meltings.

The dream of the iron masters, beginning with the 19th century, was to make it all one continuous, fluid process, and bring the complete result to pass at one melting. If that could be done the cost of production would be enormously reduced.

The discovery of such a method now seemed imminent in either England or Germany. Many experts were pressing on the door. Suddenly it would fly open and whoever was there at the moment would be able to seize the secret. Rumors of success had been heard, disbelieved, denied, scoffed at and repeated. Aaron believed them, or believed at least that if the secret had not already been captured it was about to be. That was his quest in Europe.

After a year he returned with a steel making patent, enormous quantities of queer looking material, a crew of expert English erectors, and proceeded to build what the curious Damascenes called a concern. That word was in lieu of a proper name for an object which, without being supernatural, was unique on earth. In shape it somewhat resembled a gigantic snail shell, in a vertical position, open end up, thirty feet high, made of iron plates bolted together, lined with fire clay and so mounted at its axis that it could be tipped to spill its contents. On the same foundation was mounted a blowing engine to force air at high pressure through perforations in the bottom of the shell; and there was also a great ladle in chains for hoisting molten metal to its mouth.

The work of construction was slow and tedious; it came several times to a full stop for want of something that had not been provided beforehand and could not be made on the spot. Nearly another year passed.

Then one day smoke appeared at the top of one of Aaron’s four blast furnaces and people by this sign were notified that the great experiment was about to begin. In a general way the population knew, from what the workers said, that the intention was to produce steel and to produce it direct from the ore, and also that if such a thing were possible the iron industry would undergo a basic transformation.

All of that was exciting and very important, especially to a town like New Damascus, whose living was in iron. Yet it was no technical interest in a metallurgical process that moved people to gather in large numbers to witness the experiment. What they sensed was its human meaning. It symbolized a struggle between the former partners. The outcome might deeply affect the economic position of New Damascus in the course of time. Immediately it had tense dramatic value. It would prove which was the greater man and which was right,—Aaron who believed steel cheaply produced in large quantities by a continuous one-melt process would supersede iron and bring a new age to pass, or Enoch who scoffed, who was known privately to have predicted Aaron’s ruin, and who held that to think of getting steel direct from ore in that manner, skipping the iron stage, was as absurd as to think of getting a grandson from a grandfather, skipping the father. It was contrary to the way of nature.

All the iron wisdom of the community was with Enoch. All the inert scepticism with which people behold the trial of a new thing was on his side. But the heart was for Aaron. Everybody liked him still, as in the old days, and ardently wished him success. Besides, if he brought it off, Enoch Gib would be humbled. His tyrannical ways were increasingly complained of. New Damascus would rather be a steel town under Aaron than an iron town under Enoch.

With the outcome in suspense, the experiment itself was worth seeing as a spectacle. Nothing like it could have been imagined.

First, that strange, enormous tilting vessel, resembling a snail shell, was filled with fuel and fired under blast from the blowing engine until its clay-lined interior was white hot. Then it was tilted on its axis, emptied and tilted back again. Next the molten iron from the blast furnace, instead of being run off in the sand to make the sow the pigs devour, was tapped into that great ladle in chains, hoisted on high, and poured into the white hot gullet of the tilting vessel. At the same time the blowing engine to force air through the perforations in the bottom was set in fast motion with a terrible roar. A blast of air at high pressure began now to pass upward through the fluid metal.

A series of awesome pyrotechnics ensued.

In the belly of the tilting vessel occurred a dry, chortling sound, followed by a dull, regular clapping, as of Plutonic amusement and applause. From the mouth of the vessel issued millions of sparks, particles burning brilliantly in the air. This went on for seven or eight minutes. Suddenly the sparks went out and a dull, sluggish red flame appeared, turning bright and yellowish, then becoming high, brilliant and dart-like. After several minutes terrific detonations began to take place in the vessel. With each detonation the flame shot higher. This uproar was succeeded by a period of calm. The yellowish, dart-like flame rising from the throat of the vessel was replaced by a long, white flame, which stood for several seconds proudly, then trembled, tore at the edges and abruptly collapsed. Dense black smoke issued from the mouth of the crater and the scene was dark. This was the moment at which the metal itself began to burn. The workers, uttering shrill cries of anxiety, readiness, encouragement and damnation, seized the levers controlling the vessel and tilted it over to a spilling position. Through the black smoke that corked its throat burst the fluid, blazing metal, hissing like a tortured serpent, alive in every incandescent crystal, yet doomed quickly to cool and blacken, every element touching it being fatally adverse. Men in waiting caught it headfirst neatly into a trundle pot and wheeled it off to be decanted into sand molds, like pig iron molds, but smaller.

The experiment was finished. The test was yet to come. That waited on the cooling. What was in those molds? Those squarish lumps blackening in the sand,—what would they turn out to be? No one knew.

Aaron waited until one was cool enough to handle. Then placing it like a stick of kindling against the chopping block, he hit it one blow in the middle with a sledge hammer. It broke with an ironic, ringing sound and lay in two pieces apart. He never stooped to pick them up. Without a word he dropped the hammer and walked away.

Esther received him on the terrace. She had been there for hours, anxiously watching the spectacle from afar, then waiting for him to come and tell her what the outcome was. But he did not have to tell her. She knew by his look, by his walk, by the way he took her arm. They sat for some time in silence.

“It beats me,” he said. “I can’t explain it. I don’t know what happened.”

“What was it like?” she asked. “The product I mean—was it iron or steel?”

“Pot metal,” he said contemptuously.

For a long time they stood there on the terrace looking their thoughts into space. Hers were personal. His were not. This she knew. There is probably no sense of loneliness so poignant as that which a woman feels when the idol of her being disembodies his soul and departs with it, leaving in her hands the fact of his empty presence. Lacking in herself his power of abstraction she cannot understand this phenomenon. But she verifies it and it fills her with terror. The form is there at her side, even in her arms, as it was a moment before. The man is gone. She has no idea where he is or what he is doing.

“Aaron!”

Esther whispered his name as one who dreads to wake the sleeper and yet cannot forbear to do so. Impulsively she buried her face beneath his arm as if she would enter the vacant premises. He laid his arm around her shoulder. It was an absent gesture. She had not waked him quite.

“Aaron!” she called again. “What does it matter? Come back to me.”

At that he started slightly and began to talk in a slow, far-away manner, very much as he had talked to Enoch that moonlight night after the birthday party when the idea of making New Damascus an iron town had suddenly crystallized in his mind. Esther, loving the mere sound of his voice, did not at first get the sense of his speech. He was saying:

“Out there in unlimited space are the unborn....”

These were the first words she understood. They thrilled her. She was almost faint with an ecstasy that ran through her fibre up and down. “So,” she thought, “it was that.” And she had been thinking he was far away. Now she listened tensely. He went on:

“... Millions, infinite millions, clamoring to get born, perhaps dying because they cannot cross. Here is life on this side. There, out there, is but the hope of it.”

“Cross what?” asked Esther, awesomely. “You speak as if you were gazing at it.”

“Between life that is and life unborn I see the primal chasm,” he said. “We who live have crossed. We do not remember how. The number that can cross is small. You cannot imagine how small it is. Only one in millions has the luck to get across. The rest are crowded on the edge, weeping, reaching out their hands, silently imploring us to get them over. They struggle, overwhelm themselves and fall into the void like a cataract.”

“Why is that?” asked Esther.

“Because the number that can cross is limited by the preparations of the living,” Aaron answered. “The living are selfish and forgetful. All this I see as it has been for ages, as now it is, and as it shall be. Always it has been as it is on the other side—that infinite, voiceless, despairing multitude pressing down to the brink of the void. Here in the world of the living there has been some change. We have the power of preparation. How pitiably we have exercised it! I’ll tell you all that has ever happened. Long ago, before he began by imagination to extend his faculties, man was like the other animals. He had only his hands and legs, his sheer brute strength, to work with. He housed himself in holes and caves and ate what the untilled earth set forth. You must imagine then across that primal chasm a chain of human bodies, a living monkey bridge, by which the unborn came to life most dangerously. How few they were! And yet, if more had come just then they would have starved,—died here instead of there,—because the means did not exist to house and clothe and feed them. It is man’s business not only to bridge the chasm; he must also beforehand prepare the world for those who cross. Come ten thousand years through time this way. Now see him beginning to till the soil. See him building huts. More life may be sustained. Above the void a swaying bridge of sticks. More may safely get across. And yet so very few! Another thousand years. Enter historic man. He builds him cities and fine temples and there is a narrow stone arch to span the void. The bridge, as you will note, is at any time of that material in which mankind is working. This is better. The unborn begin to rush across. But, alas! the case is worse than ever. Many now are born that never will be fed. Why?

“Imagine the world at this time in panorama. There are cities, noble cities walled about; but they are few and very far apart, and the world at large is still an untilled waste. Tillage is in small adjacent areas, and when the produce of those areas is not enough the people in the cities starve. Further away are vast fertile plains uncultivated. They are of no use because food cannot be transported thousands of miles in great quantities. The art of transportation is undiscovered. Hence frightful famines on the bounteous earth. Then in his imagination man finds a ship. That makes it possible to transport food long distances, and yet the world is hardly touched. Life is increasable only on the rim of the sea and in the valleys of rivers. An inland city is impossible.

“At length the iron age. It is our time. By mechanical means man has enormously increased his power to prepare the world for that infinite multitude unborn. It is tremendously excited—the voiceless, spectral multitude. It presses more wildly toward the void. An iron bridge has replaced the stone arch. It is a sign that many more may come. Now with railroads it is possible to bring food quickly from afar. No fertile area of the earth is inaccessible. Inland cities may begin to rise. More life in more ways can be sustained than ever before. Nevertheless, the iron bridge is a premature sign. The material is defective. It is not hard enough to bear the strain of that host pressing upon life. Besides, by no process yet discovered can it be made fast enough.

“And I see what has not yet happened. I see whole cities built higher than the tower of Babel. Those are steel buildings, sheathed with brick and stone. Brick and stone upon mortar would not stand so high. To serve but one of these cities,—to bring its food and take away its manufactures,—I see a thousand railroad trains,—trains of steel running on rails of steel. Compared with these the iron shod trains we know and think so marvellous are merely toys. I see ships of steel so vast in size that on the side of one the little vessel in which Columbus found a new world would swing like a silly skiff. I see steel in all its power—towers, tunnels, aqueducts, fantastic structures I cannot sense the meaning of. I see miles of smoking chimneys where steel is made for all these uses in unimaginable quantities. And spanning the prismal chasm I see a series of great steel bridges, multiplying as I look, seeming to cast themselves in air across the void like cobwebs. But reflect! We have not yet discovered the way to make this steel. Unless we find it quickly we shall fail that unborn host. It cannot get across; if it did it could not live. The iron bridge cannot bear its weight. Nor can the world be prepared with iron. These things of iron are premature, too soft, too slowly made, not big enough. Now do you know what it is we seek?”

“Forgive me. I did not mean to speak lightly of it,” Esther said. “None of this had been revealed to me.”

“Nor to me,” said Aaron. “Not clearly until this instant. Man works mostly in the dark, without knowing what he seeks or why....”

They repeated the experiment many times, never with precisely the same technical result, though always with the same disappointment. The metal they got was worthless. It was neither iron nor steel. The process was true. It remarkably foreshadowed the Bessemer process which some years later did achieve the result, revolutionize the industry and cause steel to overlap iron. It failed in Aaron’s hands for want of skill and chemical knowledge. The elements are not passive. They are wilful and rebellious. In their efforts to thwart man’s designs upon them they become cunning and clannish. One helps the other to escape. With this same mechanical equipment steel workers of a later time would have been able to make a perfect steel. They would have known how at a certain stage of the process to cast into the fiery, detonating mass a handful of some tame, cajoling substance, and then the exact instant at which to stop the air blast and tilt the vessel to a spilling position.

Aaron was discouraged but not despairing. Half his fortune was gone. Still, it was not an irretrievable disaster.

To hold his organization together he built a small rolling mill. He called it the Blue Jay. The site on which it stood may still be seen in New Damascus after all these years. Nothing else has ever occupied it. The mill was large enough to keep two blast furnaces going,—that is, it absorbed their output of pig iron. This was merely to fill a gap. He was bent upon steel. Having opened the mill and having found a market for all the Blue Jay iron it could make, again he took Esther and went to Europe on the same quest as before.

While they were abroad a son was born. They named him John.

On the homeward voyage Esther died and was buried at sea. The waters at last did swallow her up.

Aaron returned to New Damascus with a new steel making patent, an infant and an empty heart.

What there was in the patent nobody ever knew. He did nothing with it. The whole steel adventure was too intimately associated with memories of Esther. To succeed without her would be worse than to fail. He could not think of it. There was very little in this world he could think of. He could not bear living in the mansion without her. He closed it and went to live at the inn with his child and nurse. Then presently he could not bear living in New Damascus without her. People said it was the state of his fortunes that made him morose. He had meant to retrieve his fortunes with Esther standing by. Now he neglected business, caring nothing about it, until one day he came awake to the fact that even so little business as it takes to support a lone man and child will not attend to itself. He had to do something. But he could not do it there.

One day he dismantled the mill, loaded it in a canal boat, abandoned the irremovable blast furnaces, took his child in his arms and disappeared.

The Blue Jay Rolling Mill became famous not for its output but for its migrations. He set it up in Scranton, then moved it to Pittsburgh. It was next reported in Texas and after that in Colorado. Then he ceased to be heard of, except once, when the old Woolwine Mansion was sold to a Roman Catholic order.

So he vanished from the light of New Damascus, with his steel patent, his grief and the fourth generation in swaddling cloths,—vanished away on a flying iron mill.

VIII

Meanwhile what of Enoch?

He prospered in power and wealth and his soul turned black. From his birth he had been cruel, legal, injurious. The tragedy of Esther’s elopement left a horrible sting in his face for everyone to see. After that he became, as the Damascenes said, unnatural. In that word they characterized and judged his conduct; they never understood it. They could not say in what his unnaturalness consisted. His acts were not unnatural as acts in themselves, nor in contrast, sum or degree. They were unnatural because they were his. He disbelieved in friendship; he knew it not and doubted its existence. He disbelieved in love, too, though not for the same reason.

Esther he had loved.

A man mortally hurt in love may do almost anything naturally. He is sick prey for the cuckoo woman willing to lay her egg in another’s nest. She has only to touch him with her fingers softly and hold her tongue, but to make a soothing, mothering sound, and he will impale himself without looking.

But Jonet, daughter of Gearhard the blacksmith, was not that kind of woman. She could not have made that sound. And it seemed somehow unnatural that Enoch should marry her. No sound that was in him could imaginably vibrate in her. According to the local notion the girl was queer. Men let her alone because she made them vaguely uneasy. Her phantasies were of the primeval outdoors. She was sometimes seen in the deep woods by herself, dancing and singing as if she were not alone. She named the trees and conversed with non-existent objects. Her hair was black. Her eyes were brown and glistened. Her face was the color of iron at cherry-red heat and she had the odor of a wild thing. Enoch married her out of hand. There was no courtship. Then he proceeded to build a mansion on the west hill larger and more ostentatiously ugly than the Woolwine Mansion on the east hill. Some said, “Ah-ha! He has learned his lesson. No woman would live in that gloomy iron stone house.” Others said he did it neither in wisdom nor in love of Jonet, but to spite Bruno Mitchell, who, though he was blameless of anything that had happened, was yet Esther’s father.

A peculiarity of the Gib mansion was much talked of at the time. It was built on a twin principle,—that is, in halves, separated only by an imaginary bisecting line. Each half was as like the other as the right hand is like the left. There were two portals exactly alike, two halls, two parlors, two grand stairways, two kitchens, everything in parallel duplication until it came to the enormous solarium, which was a glass court between the two parts, the imaginary line cutting through the fountain in the center. The Philadelphia architect supposed there were two families. When he discovered it was all for one man and one wife not yet long enough married to have children he could not conceal his wonder.

“Well, why not?” said Enoch. “Haven’t you two lungs, two kidneys, two ears? One of each would do.”

The idea may have been thus derived from a principle of insurance through pairing which nature has evolved. It may have been. Nevertheless in time the imaginary dividing line became real. It was painted through the middle of the solarium. Jonet lived on one side and he on the other and there was no going to and fro,—not for Jonet. Agnes, their daughter, was brought to his side by the nurses until she was big enough to walk. She could cross the line as she pleased. But generally she had to be coaxed or bribed to cross to Enoch’s side and was always anxious to cross back.

Between Enoch and Mitchell the subject of Esther was never mentioned, not even at first. For a while they went on as if nothing had happened. Gradually Mitchell became aware that Enoch was putting pressure upon him, silently, deliberately. He made harder and harder terms for the banker’s services, until Mitchell’s profit in the relationship was destroyed, and when this fact was pointed out to Enoch he suggested a simple remedy, which was that the relationship should discontinue. As Mitchell seemed disinclined to act on this suggestion Enoch at length invited a Wilkes-Barre man to come and open a bank in New Damascus. Enoch himself provided most of the capital. The town’s business went to the new bank naturally. It was Gib’s bank and Gib was a man to be propitiated in the community. Moreover, his turning from Mitchell caused Mitchell’s bank to be regarded with a tinge of doubt. Thus Mitchell’s hope in the star of iron miserably perished. His bank withered up. His years becoming heavy he returned to New England to die.

The saying was that Enoch broke him. It would have been quite as easy to say that Mitchell broke himself upon Enoch. Yet in putting it the other way people implied a certain subtle truth wherein lay the difference between Enoch Gib and other men,—the fact of his being unnatural. His feeling toward Mitchell was natural. Anyone could understand that. It was a feeling transferred from Esther to her father. Because he loved Esther he could not hate her as much as his hurt required; therefore he hated her father more. But where another man would have manifested this feeling in some overt, unmistakable manner, Enoch so concealed it that for a long time Mitchell did not suspect its existence. And when he was aware of it, then it was too late. If Enoch had committed upon him some definite act of unreason that would have seemed natural. Instead, he exerted against him a kind of slow, deadly hydraulic pressure. Nor was that all. Revenge may require the infliction of a protracted remorseless torture. Even that one may understand. But Gib, while exerting this killing pressure, apparently had no more feeling about it than one would have about an automatic, self-recording test for torsional strength applied to a piece of iron, knowing that ultimately it was bound to break. If he had enjoyed it, if he had seemed to derive malicious satisfaction from the sequel, that would have made it human.

Yet here was a man but bearing witness for the child. The trait of character which appeared in his locked arm game with Aaron, in their boyhood, when it was Aaron’s arm that broke, now fulfilled itself. There was in him a strange passion for trying the strength of materials. He invented various mechanical devices for that purpose. He knew to an ounce what iron would stand under every kind of strain. He knew what it took to crush a brick. Apparently his first thought on looking at anything was, “What is its breaking point?” The only way to find out was to break it. And people to him were like any other kind of material. He had the same curiosity about them. What could they stand without breaking? As in human material the utmost point of resistance is a variable factor, he had to find it over and over. It is by no means certain that the mood in which he exercised this passion was deliberately destructive. That the final point of resistance is coincident with the point of destruction probably never once occurred to him as a tragic fact.

He might have said of people that in any case they were free to decline the test. They were not obliged to measure their strength with his. Yet they did it and they did it as if they could not help doing it. Here was a strange matter.

For example, how did he hold his iron workers? They hated him. They cursed him. Their injuries were as open sores that would not heal. Take the case of McAntee. It was typical. Tom McAntee was one of the best puddlers in the world. On a very hot day at the puddling furnace, in the midst of a heat, with six hundred weight of good iron bubbling like gravy, turning waxy and almost ready to be drawn, Tom dropped the beater he was working it with, wobbled a bit, put his hand to his head, and said he guessed he’d have to knock off and go home. Enoch, who watched every heat, was standing there. He called Tom’s assistant to take up the beater and then without a word he handed Tom a blue ticket. The significance of the blue ticket was this: A man in Gib’s mill had three chances with failure,—that is, he was entitled to three dismissals. The first was a yellow ticket. That was a rebuke. After three days he could come back to his job. The second dismissal was with a red ticket. That was a warning. It meant two weeks off. Then he might try again. But the third time it was a blue ticket, and that was final. He could never come back. So McAntee was fired for good, and this was without precedent under the rules because that was the first ticket he had ever got. The next day Enoch sent a clerk to McAntee’s house with Tom’s wages. A widow received them. Tom was dead.

The man who picked up Tom’s beater and went on with the heat that day, all the men of the puddling and heating crews, every man in the mill, even the miners back in the mountains,—they were all white with rage and horror, yet not one of them fumbled a stroke of labor, or quit, or thought of quitting. The effect of this incident, in fact, was to lift the breaking point through the whole organization. Those who had already had yellow and red tickets went on for years and died without ever getting a blue one. Many were dismissed. Almost never did a man quit. Why? Because, more than anything else in the world they feared Enoch Gib’s contempt for the man who broke. They could stand his cruelty; they could not bear his scorn. Also, in a strange way, the men themselves shared his contempt for the one who broke. They would not acknowledge it; they tried hard to conceal it. Yet a man could not quit without feeling inferior, not only in the sight of the tyrant but in the eyes of his fellow workers.

The demon who ruled them had no breaking point. Continuously day and night he walked among them like a principle of evil, calling to a spirit of demonry within them,—a spirit that racked their bodies, scared their souls, and responded in spite of their reason. A maddened hand would sometimes be raised against him. He never flinched. He was derisive. The hand would drop. He never gave a man a ticket for that.

Brains were another problem. He treated it separately, though in the same way and with the same consequences. Any inquisitive young man wishing to learn the iron business could begin at the bottom. He might begin in the mill and work toward the office or begin in the office and work toward the mill. He was sure to move fast in either direction. If he survived the ruthless selection that took place on the lower rungs of the ladder he could count on gaining a small partnership in a few years. An interest of two or three per cent. in the business was more stimulating than wages. As the business grew the number of junior partners increased. There might be six or eight at a time, all trying to keep pace with Enoch. They emerged from the flux like a procession of sparks, burned brightly for a little while and fell in darkness. He used them up and bought them out.

In time the town of New Damascus, like the yard of his mill, was littered with things Enoch Gib had strained to the breaking point. Some, like Tom McAntee, were decently covered up in the cemetery. Others were aimlessly walking about. Conspicuous among these were the used up partners. They all had nice houses and plenty to live on. The business was profitable. But they were withered and rickety, older than old Enoch in the midst of their years, and had a baffled look in their eyes.

The town became rich and famous. The mill was the source of its greatness. There the first American rails were rolled. For twenty years they were the best iron rails in the world. There iron nails were first cut from a sheet, like cookies out of dough. Then the Civil War came and iron that cost ten dollars a ton to make could be sold for fifty and sixty.

IX

One August evening in 1869 a number of Damascenes were gathered as usual at the railroad station to witness and audit the arrival and departure of the seven o’clock train. This was an event still miraculous and unbelievable, requiring verification of the senses. A young man swung off before the train had quite stopped, walked forward, and stood watching the small freight unload. When the last of it was off, one of the heavers, leaning from the car door, called to the station agent, Andy Weir:

“Give us an extra hand here. There’s a flat passenger.”

Weir came and looked in.

“Them’s rawkis words you use,” he said admonishingly. “Suppose it was somebody we knew.”

“Come on,” said the heaver. “Give us a hand. This ain’t a hearse. It’s a railroad train.”

Weir beckoned. Several men stepped out of the crowd to help. With a hollow grating sound the end of a long pine box was pushed into view. It came out slowly. Weir felt for handles. There weren’t any. It was a plain coffin case.

“Shoulder it,” he said to his volunteers.

They walked with it to the far end of the platform and stopped.

“Might rain,” said Weir, changing his mind. “Over there,” he added, after looking around. “Under the overhang.”

They turned back. Awkwardly, with scraping feet and gruntings, they put it down against the station wall under the projecting eave, and then stood looking at it, all a little red from the exertion and stooping.

“Tain’t yours, is it?” said Weir, turning suddenly on the young man who had followed the box to and fro.

“Yes,” he said.

“Who are you?”

“John Breakspeare.”

The station agent bent down and read the card tacked to the top of the box. The name was Aaron Breakspeare.

“I knew him,” he said, now gazing at the young man. “Knew him well, I might say. Everybody around here did. You ain’t his boy?”

“He was my father,” said the young man. “Will it be all right to——?”

“And he’s sent himself home,” said Weir. “Sent himself home to be buried. You all alone?”

“I’m the whole family,” said the young man with a smile that made Weir look away. “Will it be all right,” he began to ask again, and hesitated before the pronoun. For nearly a week he had been travelling with this freight and the dilemma was new each time. How should one refer to one’s father in a pine box? Corpse was a sodden, gruesome word. Body was too cold and distant. Remains,—no. There were left only the pronouns—it, this, that—and they were disrespectful.

“It’s all right there,” said the station agent, seeing what the young man meant. “But if you want to leave it all night we’ll take it in.”

“Only for a few minutes,” said the young man. “I’m coming right back.”

The idlers about the station waited until he was out of sight and then gathered around the box, staring at it, reading the card, looking away, commenting—

“So that’s poor old Aaron.... As the fellow said, we’re all alike at the end of the lane.... He wasn’t so oldan, I ought t’know because wasn’t I born—?... The young one brought him back.... Where’d he come from, does it say?... Likely looking boy.... What’s his name?... Wonder what old Gib’l say.... This here one stole his sweetheart away back there in....”

To John Breakspeare, son of Esther, great grandson of the founder, now turning his twentieth year, New Damascus was a legend. He had never been there. Yet without asking his way he walked straight to the inn that was his grandfather’s, since named Lycoming House, and wrote two names in the register thus:

{

John Breakspeare.
Aaron ditto

}

Denver, Colo.

They meant nothing to the clerk, who was new in the place. He blotted the writing, looked at it, and asked:

“Is your party all here?”

“Not yet,” said the young man. “We want two parlor rooms on the ground floor.”

“Connecting rooms?”

“Yes.”

“You are John Breakspeare?” the clerk guessed.

“Yes.”

“The other member of your party will be coming tonight?”

“He is waiting at the station,” said the young man. “We shall want the rooms only for tonight and tomorrow. I’ll pay now, please.”

“We can send a rig to the station,” said the clerk.

“No, thank you,” said the young man.

He looked at the rooms. In the large one he set two chairs six feet apart, facing. Then lighting all the gas, he went out, locked the door, and carried the key away in his pocket.

One hour later an undertaker’s wagon, followed by a hack, pulled up in front of Lycoming House. The young man got out of the hack and stood in the main doorway waiting. Four men drew the pine box out of the wagon, shouldered it, and started in.

There was a crash from end to end of the long front veranda overhanging the street, as twenty men sitting there in tilted chairs, their feet on the railing, smoking, all with one impulse dropped their legs and sat up straight to look. A rigid hotel custom forbids hospitality to Mr. Death. There is only one way for a corpse to pass through a hotel door. That is out. If you die inside that can’t be helped. You must go out. But if you die outside you can’t come in.

The clerk ran out to defend the threshold.

“What’s this?” he shouted. “You can’t do this. You can’t rent a mortuary chapel in a hotel.”

His words were futile. The young man turned his back, beckoned the undertaker to follow, and led the way through the door and down the hall to the big parlor room, the door of which he unlocked and threw open. They put the pine box on the floor, opened it, raised the coffin to rest on the chairs. The young man followed the empty box to the street and returned with two high candlesticks and candles. These he set at the head of the coffin and lighted. Then, locking the door behind him, he joined the undertaker outside and drove away with him.

The clerk, outraged in both his authority and his traditions, meanwhile had fallen downstairs and was shaking a red, tissue-logged hulk that dozed in a hickory chair at the end of the bar. This was Thaddeus Crawford, the proprietor. He never opened his eyes but to eat and speak and look at the books. The sign he gave of listening, or of waking when addressed, was to open his mouth,—a small, cherubic orifice,—and roll the tip of his tongue round and round it. When he closed his mouth that was a sign he was no longer interested. When he opened his eyes and spoke it was a shock to discover that he could speak distinctly, that his senses were alert, that the triumph of matter was incomplete.

During the clerk’s recital of what was taking place upstairs he rolled his tongue excitedly without opening his eyes. Then he heaved himself, achieved locomotion, and went up to look at the names on the register. He looked at them hard and long, dozed a bit, looked at them again, then returned inarticulate to the hickory chair downstairs and fell into it panting.

“What shall we do?” asked the clerk, who had followed him up and down again.

“Do the dishes,” said Thaddeus. “Wouldn’t, anyhow.... Won’t hurt the house.... Care a damn if it does.... Time we had a funeral here.” He dozed off for a minute, chortled in his depths, and spoke again with his eyes closed.

“Put it on you, didn’t he? Guess he did. Guess yes. Damn smart.... Want to see him when he comes back.... Knew his father.”

When John Breakspeare returned, the clerk, now very civil, took him down to Thaddeus.

They talked until long after the bar closed. Thaddeus was surprised to discover how little the young man knew of his pre-natal history and proceeded to restore him to his background. The picture was somewhat blurred in the romantic passages, from a feeling of delicacy. That loss was more than compensated by high lights elsewhere. He told him in turgid, topical, verbless sentences what the old Woolwine Mansion was like in that other time, how Enoch and Aaron founded the iron industry together, how they prospered, how strange it was that they got along so well, how they parted suddenly when Esther, the banker’s daughter, who was engaged to Enoch, changed her mind suddenly and married Aaron instead, and finally of Aaron’s failure with steel and how he changed all over after Esther’s death.

The narrative had form and drama and a proper ending, very unexpected to the young man. The parlor room in which the body of his father then lay and the one adjoining in which he himself would spend the night were rooms he had lived in once before. They were the rooms his father took when he closed the Woolwine Mansion, unable to live there without Esther, and came to this inn with nurse and infant. That infant was himself.

It came two o’clock. With no premonitory sign Thaddeus heaved himself out of the hickory chair and called for the porter to put out the lights.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I haven’t thought of it,” said the young man.

“Stay with us,” said Thaddeus. “Long as you like.”

On his way to bed Thaddeus said to the clerk: “Give him anything he wants. Don’t send him a bill till he asks for it. Don’t send him a bill at all.”

A spiritual adventure awaited John Breakspeare to complete his day. As he re-entered the room where his father’s body was and closed and locked the door behind him he got suddenly a sense of reality beyond any perception of things. It was a reality to which he himself merely pertained. This was a sense of existence. The story he had just heard in the bar room, as he was hearing it, seemed to concern only his father; and his father was a separate being who had lived and was dead and about to be buried. But no. That was not so. Vividly, yet with no way of saying it, no way of thinking it, with only a way of feeling it, he became in one instant aware that the story no less concerned himself. Everything that had happened to his father had happened also to him. His father was dead, for there he lay. That was the evidence of things. Beyond was the truth that his father was not dead. The same life thread continued in him. That naïve delusion of youth in which oneself is perceived as a separate miracle, beginning at the toes and ending at the top of the head, was shattered. Back of his father and mother were others, numberless. Their history was his history. He was but a link in a continuous scheme, as his father was, and his father’s father, and so on and on, back through an eternity of moments. The past surrounded him. It was intangible, enormous, indivisible.

One of the candles, dying with a splutter, startled him. The other one also was low. He replaced them, lighted the fresh ones, then slid back the panel of the coffin cover and gazed at the face of his father with strange, uneasy interest.

How little he knew of him! Always he had thought of him as a man of sorrow. Yet once he had been gay and spontaneous, full of the enthusiasms and compulsions of life. Never before had he sensed anything of that. The first recollection of his father was sad. It was of going with him, hand in hand, to an open air show, trembling with excitement. It was a special occasion. His father had come a long distance to see him. How he knew that he could not remember. There were animals in the show and men and women who made them perform, and noise and music and peanuts and wonderful smells and much going on. He was delirious with happiness until he noticed that his father was weeping. That almost spoiled the day. After that he could not remember him again until somebody took him a long journey, lasting many days, for aught he knew many years, and at last they found his father, who was in bed, in a little white bed, and very strange, and he had not liked kissing him. Then was a time, rather dim, when they were together and became great and equal friends. This could not last. He was sent to school in Philadelphia and saw his father only at long intervals; and each time they had to get acquainted all over again. They both looked forward eagerly to these meetings and always they were disappointed, especially in the beginnings of new acquaintanceship, until the strangeness wore off and they had reconstructed their memories of each other. At least, it had been so with him. He remembered it as a fact. And now he realized that it had been so also with his father. Intuition multiplied his recollections and made them new. He remembered something he had never once thought of before. They were together, waiting for the train that was to take him back to school. He was restless with childish impatience and counted the minutes that delayed their parting. The train was late. When it came he clamored to get aboard, lest he should be left, and almost forgot to look back and wave. The wistful sadness in his father’s face meant nothing to him at the time. Now he understood it.

Suddenly, as he stood there gazing at his father’s face, his spirit of itself achieved a form of mystical experience such as may occur naturally and surprisingly at a certain time of youth and is seldom if ever repeated save in the lives of ascetics. He felt himself flooded with understanding, though he knew not in the least what it was he so lucidly understood. There was a sense of new friendship then beginning with his father,—a friendship that should be perfect, wordless, indestructible, beyond peril. Never had he felt so near to his father, so alive to him, so communicative. Death at the same time changed its aspect. It was a catastrophic event, but inconclusive. It was not the final enigma. It had nothing to do with life, for life was a prior transaction and bound to go on. It had nothing to do with love, for love was parallel to life and reached beyond death. Life and love,—they were truly mysterious. For death there must be some simple explanation, like the explanation of night, without which every sunset would fill mankind with the terror of extinction. It was ... death was ... death itself was only ... what? He had almost seen it, what it was, and then suddenly it disappeared. He had looked the wrong way. For an instant it was there. He tried to reconstruct the point of view. But when he began to think of what he was thinking the dazzling, jewel-like space he had been staring into collapsed with an inaudible crash. All that was left of it was the dead face, reflecting the light of the candles. That experience was closed. Never in his life was it repeated. He had no idea what it meant, then or afterward. Yet the memory of it became his chief spiritual asset. One thought thereafter controlled his life. He was his father continued.

X

He was yet to see his father in another light. That was the light of universal human affection. For a day there were two kinds of people in New Damascus,—those who knew Aaron and others. Nobody was asked. It was meant to be a private ceremony. But that was impossible. All who knew him came to assist at the obsequies. They came from Quality Street and they came from the company houses beyond the canal. There were hundreds of old iron workers and miners, who, at John’s suggestion, walked in a body behind the hearse. He was amazed and deeply moved by all this demonstration of feeling; and saddened by it at the same time, for here were people strange to him whose knowledge of his father was older and greater than his own.

Enoch Gib neither came nor stayed away. As the funeral procession departed from the inn he was observed sitting on the veranda, his feet on the railing, his hat on his head, smoking a cigar, gazing vacantly into space.

Somebody said: “Tonight he will give a blue ticket to every man in the mill who took time off for this. That’s why he came.”

That was not true. Then why did he come? There is no answer. He himself probably did not know. The mourners returning saw him sitting there still. He sat there for hours, until evening, utterly oblivious. Then he rose, crossed the town and disappeared up the path to Throne Rock.

Late that night the furnace men at No. 4, deaf as furnace men by habit are to the uproar of the smelting process, looked at one another saying, “What was that?”

It was a sound of ribald laughter off the mountain, home downward by the wind.

An old man spoke, one who stood in an open shirt, grey hair on his chest, stray grey curls below the edge of his skull cap, alight in the furnace glow.

“That’s Enoch,” he said, “crowing over Aaron.”

They listened. The laugh was not repeated. But as they turned away, letting down their breath, another sound much worse came down the wind and caused their skins to creep.

That was Enoch screaming.

XI

John Breakspeare sat on the veranda of Lycoming House thinking of this situation and of what he should do. His father’s old friends had pursued him with offers of hospitality, and as he had to choose, he chose that of Thaddeus, for two reasons. One was that he liked Thaddeus extravagantly; the other was that living at the inn entailed no social amenities. He was by no means a solitary person. Naturally he was gregarious. But for the first time in his life he wished to be let alone, and that great friendly hulk dozing in the hickory chair at the end of the bar was the only person who had no meddling curiosity and tactfully ignored his existence.

Well, first, there was no available estate, save only a few thousand dollars in money. The wandering Blue Jay mill wore out at last. Aaron’s final act of business was to sell its good-will to a corporation. That was where the few thousand dollars came from. The plant itself was scrapped for junk. The day after that had happened Aaron lay him down with a fever and never got up again. John, in his junior year at college, was summoned at once, at Aaron’s request, as if he knew he were going to die. Yet he could not wait. He died the night before the boy arrived.

His will, written by himself on a sheet of foolscap, was very simple:

“All I have whatsoever I leave to my son, John. There is no one else.”

Pinned to this was a personal note as follows:

“Boy of Esther, I am leaving you. Go straight and God bless you. Bury me at New Damascus.”

The writing, though clear, was evidently an achievement of great effort. He was dying then and was gone in less than an hour.

The old Woolwine holdings of ore and coal, though still intact, were in a state of suspended development and not very valuable, perhaps quite unsaleable. As for the ore, it would not pay to develop that any further. The whole iron region was now beginning to be flooded with cheap Mesaba ore from the head of the Great Lakes. Gib, in fact, was already buying this ore for his blast furnaces. He could buy it for less than the cost of producing his own. As for the coal, the only market there had ever been for that was at the New Damascus blast furnaces. Gib owned all the furnaces and had all the coal he needed. Coal is coal, of course; it may be sold anywhere. But the Woolwine holdings, which John Breakspeare inherited, were probably not large enough to bear the capital that would be necessary to put New Damascus coal into commercial competition with the output of the big established collieries up the river.

These thoughts all wound up together in the young man’s meditations led nowhere. They merely revolved. They fell into a kind of rhythm. The same ideas kept repeating themselves in an obsessed, uncontrollable manner. “I’m stupid,” he said, and got up to walk. Of a sudden he became aware of what it was that had been making his thoughts go round like that.

There was a throbbing in the air, a rythmic punctuation, a ceaseless hollow murmur. He had heard this voice before, continuously in fact, without attending to it. Now he listened. It came from the chest of the great driving engine in the rolling mill, at the other side of town. It said:

Wrought iron

Wrought iron

Wrought iron

Iron, iron.

The mill!

The mill his father founded!

Volcanic fires, incandescent difficulties, quick, elemental fluids,—in these his father wrought and failed. Had not the son some pressing business with that same Plutonic stuff? He moved as if he had. With no shape of an idea in his mind he walked purposefully, stalking the voice of the engine, and came to the rear of the mill.

It was evening.

He had never seen an iron mill before. For some time he stood outside the gate, viewing it at large, smelling and tasting its fumes, acquainting his senses with its moody roar. There was at first no sign of human agency. Then he made out figures passing back and forth through bolts of sudden light. They seemed solitary, silent, bored. The notion crossed his fancy that man had tapped the earth of forces which turned genii on his hands, enslaved him, commanded weary obedience and in the end consumed him.

Now a shift was taking place. Night crews were coming on; day crews were going out. Those arriving walked erect; their faces, white and clean, showed vividly against the murky texture. Those going out were limp and bent; their faces did not show at all. Twice a day they passed like that, bodies healed by sleep and food relieving those all fagged and bruised from a twelve-hour struggle with the genii. Puddlers, heaters, hammermen and rollers were marked apart from common, unskilled labor by leather aprons on their feet, tied round the ankles, flapping as they walked.

Curious glances fell upon the young man idling there in the dusk. Nobody spoke to him. On the gate was a painted sign: “Positively no admittance.” The rule was rigid, even more so in Gib’s mill than at any other in the country, and all iron working plants in those days were guarded very jealously because spies went to and fro stealing methods, formulas and ideas. The weakness of a rigid rule is that everyone supposes it will be observed. No doubt the men who saw Breakspeare enter took him to be a young man from the office. No common trespasser would be so cool about it; a spy would make his entrance surreptitiously. Whatwise, nobody stopped him. He went all the way in and was swallowed up in the gloomy, swirling, glare-punctured commotion. And once inside he could move freely from place to place. No one paid him the slightest heed.

The air was torn, shattered, upheaved, compressed, pierced through, by sounds of shock, strain, impact, clangor, cannonade and shrill whistle blasts, occurring in any order of sequence, and then all at one time dissolving in a moment of vast silence even more amazing to the ear. Conversation would be possible only by shrieks close up. The men seemed never to speak at their work. They did not communicate ideas by signs either. Each man had his place, his part, his own pattern of action, and did what he did with a kind of mechanical inevitability, as if it were something he had never learned. They were related not to each other but to the process, kept their eyes fixedly on it for obvious reasons, and stepped warily. A false gesture might have immediate consequences.

The process just then was that of rolling iron bars. From where Breakspeare stood he saw the latter end of it. He saw the finished bars spurt like dull red serpents from between the rolls. Two men standing with their gaze on the running hole from which the reptile darted forth snared it by the neck with tongs, walked slowly backward with it as the rolls released the glowing body, until its tail came free; then dragged it off, a tame, limp thing, turning black, and put it straight along with others to cool.

The whole process could not be seen at once. It took place in a train of events covering many acres of area. It could be followed backward,—that is by going from the finished bars to the source of the iron, or in the other direction downstream, from the puddling furnaces where the iron is cooked, to the hammermen who mauled it into rough shape and thence to the rolls. Breakspeare, having started that way, traced it backward, from the finished bar to the source of its becoming.

He moved to a position from which he could see all that happened at the rolls.

The rolls were merely enormous cylinders revolving together in gears, with grooves through which to pass the malleable iron. The first groove through which it passed was very large, the next one smaller, the next one smaller still, until the last, out of which the final form appeared. The iron had to be passed back and forth through each of these grooves in turn.

On each side of the rolls stood men in pairs with tongs,—silent, foreboding men, with masks on their faces and leather aprons on their feet, singularly impassive and still, save in moments of action. At intervals of two or three minutes a man came running with two hundred weight of incandescent iron in the shape of a rough log five or six feet long, held in tongs swung by a chain to an overhead rail, and dropped it at the feet of the rollers. Becoming that instant alive, the rollers picked it up with tongs, passed it through the first groove of the rolls, giving it a handful of sand if it stuck, and then stood again in that attitude of brooding immobility, leaning on their tongs, looking at nothing, bathed in sparks as the tail of the iron disappeared. On the other side of the rolls similar men with similar tongs seized it as you would take a reptile by the neck in a cleft stick, controlled and guided its wrigglings, turned and thrust its head into the next smaller groove. Thus they passed and repassed it through the rolls, catching it each time by the neck and returning it through a smaller groove. Each time it was longer, more sinuous, less dangerous, until at last, with the final pass, it became what Breakspeare had first seen, namely, a finished wrought iron bar, ready to cool.

From the rolls he moved to the tilthammers. At corresponding intervals the hammermen received on tongs from the puddling furnace two hundred weight of iron in the form of a flaming dough ball, laid it on a block, turned it under the blows of the tilthammer falling like a pile driver from above, until it was the shape of a log, fit to be passed through the rolls. Then helpers, lifting it in tongs, ran with it to the rollers.

Beyond the tilthammers were the puddling furnaces. There the process began.

A puddling furnace is a long, narrow, maw-like chamber of brick and fire clay with a depressed floor for the molten iron to lie in and a small square door at the end. It is heated to inferno by a cataract of flame rising from a fire pit at one side and sucked by draught across the roof of its mouth. When the whole interior is like a dragon’s gullet, white hot, wicked and devouring, cold pigs of iron are cast in, the door is banged to, the chinks are stopped and the puddler gathers up his strength.

In the door is a small round hole. Through that hole the puddler watches. When the iron is fluid his work begins. The thing he represents is Satan raking hell. With his beater and working only through that little round hole, he must stir, whip, knead and skim the iron. The impurities drain away in a lava stream beneath the door. He may not pause. The beater gets too hot to hold, or begins itself to melt. He casts it into a vat of water and continues with another.

The puddler is the baker, the pastry cook, the mighty chef. All that follows, the whole pudding, the quality of the iron to the end of its life, will be the test of his skill and daemonic impatience.

Presently the iron begins to bubble gravely, turning viscous. Now the art begins. The puddler, still working through that small hole with a long, round bar, must ball the iron. That is, he must divide the molten mass into equal parts and make each part a ball of two hundred weight just. Having made the balls he must keep them rolling round without touching. If they do not roll they will cool a little on the under side and burn on top; and if they touch they will fuse together and his work is lost. One by one he draws them near the door. They must not all come done at once. Therefore this one takes the hottest place; that one stays a little back. Then one is ready. The door jerks open. A helper, working tongs swung by a chain to a monorail overhead, reaches in, plucks out the indicated flaming pill, rushes it headlong to the hammermen and comes running back to get another.

The puddling process fascinated Breakspeare. He watched it for a long time. He particularly enjoyed watching the work of a certain young puddler, tall and lithe, in whose movements there was an extraordinary fulness of power, skill and unconscious grace. He was bare to his middle, wore a skull cap and gloves, and in his outline, turning always in three dimensions, a quality was realized that belongs to pure sculpture. He moved in space as if it were a buoyant element, like water. Never did he make a sudden start or stop. No gesture was angular. One action flowed into another in a continuous pattern. When with the furnace freshly loaded, the door closed, the chinks all stopped and the draught roaring, the moment came to rest he flung himself headlong but lightly on a plank bench and lay there on his side, his head in his hand, propped from the elbow. And when he rose it was all at once without effort.

Standing in deep shadow, outside the area of action, Breakspeare was not aware that the puddler had once looked at him or knew of his presence there; and he was startled when without any warning at all that person departed from his orbit, came close to him, and shouted in a friendly voice:

“Well, how about it?”

“Bully,” Breakspeare shouted back at him.

They looked at each other, smiling.

“Don’t let the old man catch you,” said the puddler. “He’s about due.”

“All right,” said Breakspeare.

The puddler went back to his work and never looked at him again.

Breakspeare liked the encounter. He liked the puddler, whose friendliness was in character with his movements, swift and unerring. He was at the same time in a curious way disappointed. When the puddler spoke he was a man, like any other, who made the same sounds and had the same difficulty in overriding the uproar. Speaking was the single act that visibly required effort of him. But as a puddler, with the glare in his face, an ironic twist on his lips, his body glistening with perspiration, his left leg advanced and bent at the knee and his other far extended, every muscle in him running like quicksilver under satin,—then he was a demon, colossal, superb, unique. When he spoke that impression was ruined; when he returned to his work it was restored.

These were not Breakspeare’s reflections. They were his feelings, and so engrossed him that he was unaware of being no longer alone in the shadow. Enoch Gib stood close beside him watching the puddlers. The puddlers knew the old man was there. One sensed their knowing it from an increase in the tension of the work. But they did not look at him. Breakspeare turned as if to move away.

“Stay where you are,” said Gib, in a voice that pierced the uproar. He seemed to do this with no effort. It was in the pitch of his voice. When he had seen the end of the heat and the iron was out he added: “Come with me.”

They walked out side by side through the front gate, across the road to the little brick office building, into the front room. The old man took off his coat, hung it on the back of his chair, spread a towel over it, and sat down at a double walnut desk the top of which was littered with ragged books, unopened letters, scraps of metals, sections of railroad iron, scientific journals, cigar ashes and little models of machinery, in the utmost confusion. Breakspeare, unasked, sat himself down at the other side of the desk and waited. He had a feeling that all the time Gib had been expecting him to break and run and was prepared to detain him forcibly. Why, he could not imagine. He knew nothing about the sacredness of iron working premises nor of the suspicion with which intruders were regarded.

“What were you doing in the mill?” Gib asked, brutally.

“Looking at it,” said the young man.

“Who sent you?”

“Nobody.”

“How did you get in?”

“Walked in.”

“At what gate?”

“On the other side.”

Gib made mental note of that statement. Then he asked:

“Who are you?”

“John Breakspeare.”

Gib had been regarding the young man in a malevolent manner. That expression seemed to freeze. Then slowly he averted his face. His gaze fixed itself on a burnt cigar hanging over the edge of the desk. He sat perfectly still, as if rigid, and Breakspeare could hear the ticking of a watch in his waistcoat pocket.

“What do you want?” he asked in a loud voice, as if they were in the mill.

Until that instant Breakspeare had no definite thought of wanting anything in this place. First had been that reaction to the throb of the engine. Then came the impulse to visit the mill. That impulse was unexamined. It had not occurred to him to think that anything might come of it; he had not thought of meeting Gib. Nevertheless the question as it was asked started a purpose in his mind.

“I want to learn the iron business,” he said.

“Here?” said Gib, quickly.

“Isn’t this a good place to learn it?” the young man retorted.

For a long time the old man sat in meditation.

“The iron business,” he said. “Mind now, you said the iron business.”

“Yes.”

“Not the steel business.... Iron! Iron!”

“I don’t know the difference,” said Breakspeare, adding: “Anyhow, you don’t teach the steel business here, do you?”

The old man looked at him heavily. Then he got up to pace the floor. Once, with his face to the wall, he laughed in a mirthless way. That seemed to clear his mind.

“Come Thursday at eight,” he said.

XII

When John told his friend Thaddeus he was going to work in the mill Thaddeus rolled his tongue in a very droll way.

“You seem surprised.”

“Ain’t,” said Thaddeus. “Ain’t. Can’t tell when I’m surprised.”

That was all he would say.

Everybody who knew the past was astonished. It was supposed that the young man did not know what he was doing. A very old citizen of Quality Street, with a glass eye that gave him a furtive, untrustworthy appearance, came to visit Aaron’s son on the hotel veranda and approached the subject by stalking it. He was not a presumptuous person. Never had he meddled in the affairs of others, though he would say that if he had it would have been more often to their advantage than prejudice. This matter of which he was making at his time of life an exception, a precedent in a sense, was nobody’s business of course. Still, in another way it was. There had been a great deal of talk about it. Nobody wished to take it upon himself to speak out. That could be understood. There were so many things to think of. Feelings of great delicacy were involved. Still what a pity, he said—what a pity for any of these reasons to withhold from Aaron’s son information he would not come by for himself until it was perhaps too late.

“I must be very stupid,” said John at one of the significant pauses. “You are evidently trying to tell me something.”

“You are going to work in the mill?” said the old citizen.

“Yes.”

“Do you know what happens to Enoch Gib’s young men?”

He did not know. The old citizen told him. When he was through Aaron’s son thanked him and made no comment. After that people said he knew what he was doing. Some said he had a subtle design.

That was not the case. He had an inherited feeling for iron. Here was an opportunity to learn the business. There was of course a romantic touch in learning it on the ancestral scene. But that was an after-thought. It never occurred to him that he had a feud to keep with Enoch Gib. So far as he could see there was more reason for Gib to hate him as his father’s son than for him to hate Gib as a man who might have been his father if his mother had not changed her mind. His father had never spoken ill of Gib—had never spoken of him at all in fact. It was not in the Breakspeare character to bequeath a quarrel. And since Gib had been willing in this strange way to receive the son of a man whom he hated indelibly why should the son be loath? As for what happened to Enoch Gib’s young men,—and of this John heard more and more,—that was a matter he lightly dismissed.

A curious fact was that from the first Aaron’s son liked Enoch Gib. Perhaps like is too strong a word. His feeling for him was one of irrational sympathy, which, though he did not know it, had been Aaron’s feeling for Enoch to the end.

When John presented himself at eight o’clock Thursday morning Gib’s way with him was impersonal and energetic.

“Did you ever sell anything?” he asked.

“No,” said John.

“You will,” said Gib, “I see it in you.”

He removed the towel from over his coat on the back of the chair, folded the towel, laid it on the desk, and drew on his coat, saying: “I’ll show you now the difference between steel and iron. The first thing to be learned. The last thing to be forgotten.”

They went to the mill yard. Laborers were piling up rails that looked all alike to John except that they varied in length and weight. Gib led the way straight to an isolate pile and pointed John’s attention to the name of an English firm embossed on the web of each rail.

“That’s a steel rail,” he said. “It’s imported into this country from England. Now look.”

He beckoned. Four men who knew what he wanted lifted one of those rails and dropped it across a block of pig iron on the ground. It snapped with a clean, crisp break in the middle.

“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.

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.

Man is the only animal that whistles in the dark. Being so long in a dogged minority, so much discouraged, so sore in their hope, the protagonists of steel were boastful. They could not boast of their product. It was bad. Nor of their success. It was worse. They had to boast of things which one could believe without proof. The Bessemer steel process, they said, was the enemy of privilege. It was for the many against the few. It would transform and liberate society and cast down all barriers to progress.

They were the radicals, the visionaries, the theorists, the yes-sayers of their time. Many a sound, conservative, no-saying iron man was seduced by their faith to exchange his money for experience.

And all the time, bad as it was, steel kept coming more and more into use, especially,—that is to say, almost exclusively in the form of rails. And the reason the steel rail kept coming into use was that an amazing human society yet unborn, one that should have shapes, aspects, wants, powers and pastimes then undreamed of, was calling for it,—calling especially for the steel rail.

The steel men heard it. That was what kept them in hope. The iron men heard it and were struck with fear.

Why was it calling for steel rails instead of iron rails?—steel rails that broke like clay pipes against iron rails that could be tied in knots? Did it care nothing for its unborn life and limb? It cared only a little for life and limb. Much more it cared about bringing its existence to pass, and that was impossible with iron rails, with anything but steel rails, for reasons that we already know, having passed them. They require only to be focused at this point.

It was true of the iron rail that it was unbreakable and therefore safe and superior to the steel rail for all uses of human society in the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century. That was still the iron age. But human society as it would be in the twentieth century was calling for a rail that would meet the needs of a steel age. This was a society that was going to require a ton of freight to be moved 2,500 miles annually for each man, woman and child in the country! Transportation on that scale of waste and grandeur had never been imagined in the world. Iron rails simply could not stand the strain. They would not break under it. They would be smashed flat. They would wear out almost as fast as they could be spiked down.

It was true of the steel rail, as the iron people said, that it was very breakable, of tricky temper, dangerous to life and limb. Society in 1870 ran much more safely on iron rails. But the unborn society of the steel age was making rail specifications beforehand. It was a society for which a quarter of a million miles of railway would have to be laid in one generation. That simply could not be done with iron rails. There would not be enough fuel, labor and time by the old wrought iron process to make or replace iron rails on any such scale. Shoeing that society with iron rails would be like shoeing an army with eiderdown slippers.

The iron people of course could make a steel in their own way from wrought iron, melted again and carbonized,—fine, cutlery steel, very hard and trustworthy,—but you could not dream of making rails by the millions of tons from that kind of steel. The making of it was too slow and the cost prohibitive.

The three primary desiderata in the oncoming society’s rail problem were hardness, cheapness, quantity.

The new process produced a rail within these three requirements. It was hard because it was steel. It was cheap because the steel was got direct from the ore at an enormous saving of time and fuel. And it could be made in practically unlimited quantities.

The Bessemer method made possible at once an increase of one hundred fold in metallic production. That was miraculous.

The iron age took three thousand years.

The steel age developed in thirty.

Enoch Gib stood with his face to it. He fought it with his eyes closed. His strength crystallized against it. When it passed him by with a rush and uproar it passed New Damascus. Never was a pound of steel fabricated at New Damascus. It was an iron town. Steel towns grew up around it. That made no difference so long as he lived, and when he was gone, then it was too late. Opportunity had forsaken that spot.

The meaning of events is swift. Yet events are spaced with days and days are of equal length, lived one at a time. Historically you see that the iron rail was suddenly and hopelessly doomed. But from a contemporary point of view one might have been for a long time in doubt. It was not until 1883, thirteen years after John’s arrival in New Damascus, that the steel rail definitely superseded the iron rail.

XIII

Enoch Gib’s knowledge of human nature in the uses of business was deep and exact. He was not mistaken in Aaron’s son. John Breakspeare could sell iron rails. He could sell anything.

Selling ability in its highest development is a strange gift. There is no accounting for it. One has it or one has it not. He had it in that all-plus-X degree, which is the indefinite part of genius. The final irony was that Gib should have discovered it, for it belonged to the steel age and was destined to be turned against him. In this young man who could sell iron rails he prepared a weapon for his invincible adversary.

The steel age always knew in advance what it needed. Salesmanship was its very breath. Why? Because when it came suddenly, like a natural event, men found themselves in command of means for producing wealth,—that is to say, goods, enormously beyond any scale of human wants previously imaginable. Production attended to itself. It ran utterly wild. There was a chronic excess of producing capacity because the supply of steel had been magically increased one hundred fold and steel was the basis of an endless profusion of new goods.

The dilemma that presented itself was unique. Its name was over-production. It occurred simultaneously in Great Britain, Germany, France and the United States. They all had the same goods to sell, the very same goods, rising from steel, and they sold them to each other in mad competition. Prices fell steadily for many years, continuously, until goods were preposterously cheap, and always there was a surplus still. Rails fell from $125 to $18 a ton, and the face of two continents was netted with railways. Yet there was a surplus of rails.

Never before in the history of mankind did goods increase faster than wants. It is not likely ever to happen again.

In a way that becomes clear with a little reflection, a surplus of steel caused a surplus of nearly everything else—food to begin with. There was a great surplus of food because steel rails opened suddenly to the world the virgin lands of the American west. The iron age had foreshortened time and distance. The steel age annihilated them.

It made no difference how far a thing was hauled. Transportation was cheap because steel was cheap. Kansas wheat was sold in Minneapolis, Chicago and in Liverpool. Minneapolis made flour and sent it to New York, Europe and back to Kansas.

The great availability of food released people from agriculture. They went to the industrial centers to make more steel and things rising of steel, so that there were more of such goods to sell.

More, more, more of everything.

Sell! Sell! Sell!

That was the voice of the steel age.

But we overrun the thread of the story. It lies still in the iron age.

How did John Breakspeare sell iron rails for Enoch?

It is to be mentioned that he founded the art of Messianic advertising. He took the message of iron rails to the people. He dramatized the subject.

After four weeks of study and reflection, going to and fro in the mill, absorbing all the technical literature there was, acquainting himself with the way of the trade,—Gib watching and letting him alone,—he outlined a plan of campaign. It involved a considerable outlay of money. Gib approved it nevertheless and the young evangel set forth.

At Philadelphia he arranged an exhibit the first feature of which was a pair of New Damascus iron rails that had bridged a perilous gap twelve feet wide and twelve feet deep washed out under a railway track at night. A locomotive and six passenger cars passed safely over those rails in the dark. The miracle was discovered the next morning. Steel rails under that strain would have snapped. This was very effective. He reproduced in public the breaking tests applied to steel and iron rails alternately in the New Damascus mill yard. He collected data on railway accidents, which were then numerous and terrifying, and published regularly in the newspapers a cumulative record of those that were caused by the failure of imported steel rails, at the same time offering $10,000 for proof of the failure of a New Damascus iron rail under any conditions. He handled his facts in a sensational manner. Public sentiment was aroused. In several state legislatures bills were introduced requiring all new railway mileage to be laid with iron rails and all steel rails in use to be replaced with iron. None of these bills was passed. Still, they were useful for purposes of propaganda. A Committee of Congress made an extensive inquiry at which the young Elias from New Damascus appeared and made a worthy impression. This was the beginning of his familiarity with the lawmaking mentality. Without asking for it directly he got what the iron people had prayed for in vain. That was a punitive tariff against foreign steel rails. He had moved public opinion; the rest was automatic.

Thus he sold first the idea of iron rails. Next he proceeded to sell the rails.

Railway building at that time was the enchanted field of creative speculation. Railways were made in hope, rejoicing and sheer abandon of wilful energy. Once they were made they served economic ends, as a navigable waterway will, no matter where or how it goes, but for one that was intelligently planned for the greatest good of the greatest need four or five others derived their existence fantastically from motives of emulation, spite, greed, combat and civic vaingloriousness. When in the course of events all these separate translations of the ungoverned imagination were linked up the result was that incomprehensible crazy quilt which the great American railway system was and is in the geographical sense. It was more exciting and more profitable to build railways than wagon roads. That is how we came to have the finest railways and the worst highways of any country in the civilized world.

Into this field of sunshine and quicksand marched the young man from New Damascus. He could scent a new railway project from afar, up or down wind, and then he stalked it day and night. He sold it the rails. Without fail he furnished the rails. He sold them for cash when he could, and when he couldn’t get cash he took promissory notes, I O U’s, post-dated checks, bonds and stocks. He took all he could get of what he could find, but whatever it was he sold the rails.

Enoch Gib, greatly startled at first, was willing to see how merchandising by this principle would work out. But as he was unused to excursions in finance and as the notes and stocks and bonds of railways in the gristle piled up in his safe he called in his banker for consultation. John was present.

“It’s not so much of a gamble if you go far enough,” said John. “There’s a principle of insurance in it. It would be risky to sell insurance on one ship. Nobody does that. It is perfectly safe to sell insurance on a thousand ships. This is the same thing. Some of these railways will bust of course. But if we sell rails to all of them we can afford to lose on the few that go down. The whole question is: do you believe in railways?”

The two old men looked at their youthful instructor with anxious wonder.

“Is that your own idea?” the banker asked.

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” John answered.

“When you mention it, yes,” said the banker. “I should never have thought of it that way.”

Later the banker spoke privately with Gib.

“That’s a very dangerous young man.”

“Very,” said Gib.

Yet it worked out rather well, owing partly to the principle and partly to John’s uncanny instinct for making a safe leap. He could smell bankruptcy before it happened. Moving about as he did continually in the surge of the railway excitement he had access to much private information. He knew pretty well how it fared with the companies that owed the mill for rails. If one were verging toward trouble he knew how and where to get rid of its paper at a discount. There were losses; but the losses were balanced by profits in those cases where a company that had been charged a very high price for rails because it was short of cash and nobody else would take its notes was able at length to redeem its paper in full.

In John’s mind was no thought of either loyalty to iron or disloyalty to steel. It was a question of American rails against foreign rails. Steel rails were entirely of foreign origin. The steel age had not crossed the ocean. His work justified itself. It was immediately creative and greatly assisted railway building. It was speculative also, and this is to be remembered. A collateral and very important result was that it hastened the advent of the American steel rail, since the punitive tariff against foreign rails gave the American steel people the incentive of greater profit. That presently changed the problem.

Meanwhile, never had the New Damascus mill been so active. Never had its profits been greater. Yet Enoch Gib was uneasy. He had offered the young man a partnership. John had flatly declined it.

What did that mean?

XIV

For twenty years the social life of New Damascus had been as an untended orchard,—shapeless, perfunctory and reminiscent. Its estate was a memory running back to the old Woolwine Mansion and the days of Aaron. It had no rallying point. There was youth as a biological fact without gaiety, sparkle or sweet daring. Quality Street lived on its income. Young men succeeded their fathers in business. The girls, after music and finishing at Philadelphia, returned to New Damascus and married them.

The Gib Mansion might as well have been a mausoleum. Life was never entertained there. It did not expect to be. Jonet was nobody until Gib married her. After that she was the community’s commiseration. She died when Agnes, their only child, was ten. The obsequies were private. At the grave, besides the sexton and the minister, and Gib holding Agnes by the hand, there was one other person. That was Gearhard, the father of Jonet, who stood with his feet crossed and his left forearm resting on the sexton’s shoulder as on the bellows-sweep, in a contemplative attitude. People spoke of it literally. There, they said, was another thing Enoch had broken and cast away. No wonder he wished to bury it privately.

Agnes was sent off to school. She had lately returned and was now living at the Gib Mansion alone with her father. Nobody knew her. There was some mystery about her. A story of unknown origin, and unverified, was that she had been found out at school in an unchaperoned escapade, which so enraged old Enoch that he brought her home and deprived her of liberty. It would be like him to do that. Moreover, in the iron age such discipline was feasible. Youth had not yet delivered itself from parental tyranny. That was reserved to be one of the marvels of the steel age. In 1870 any girl of seventeen was dependent, and one in the situation of Agnes Gib was helpless.

John’s advent on this iron grey scene produced a magical change. He was rightful heir to all the social tradition there was in New Damascus. This would have meant nothing in itself. But he liked it. He was not then nor did he ever become the kind of man who must renounce life to reach success. That is a matter partly of temperament and partly of capacity. Knowledge necessary to his ends he acquired easily, seemingly without effort, even technical knowledge. His imagination worked with the ease of fancy and knew no fatigue. Business was a game at which he played. Therefore it could not devour him. Without a moment’s notice he could turn from one kind of play to another and back again. He would dance all night and come with a crystal mind to the day’s work. Frivolity seemed to stimulate or recharge his mind.

The youth of New Damascus adored him. A group spontaneously formed around him. He kept large rooms at the inn, where he entertained. More than half his time was spent away from New Damascus, but the new social order adjusted itself to his movements. When he was at home there were parties, dances, suppers, excursions, flirtings and episodes. All this took place on the plane of Quality Street. But his liking for people neither began nor ended there. It knew no petty distinctions. There were two kinds of people in the world,—his kind and others. And his kind were all the same to him no matter where he found them. He had friends among the mill workers—big, roystering fellows with whom he often went revelling to fill out a night. One of these was Alexander Thane, the splendid puddler who had spoken to him that first night in the mill. They became fast friends.

He scandalized people without offending them. Whatever he did, that was John. He did anything he liked and it was forgiven beforehand. His errancies were extravagant and alarming, such as had been almost certain to involve a superficial nature in disaster. They were never wicked or immoral, never hurtful to others and seemed but to innocently enhance the romantic aspect of his personality. This may be true only of one whose character is superior to his follies. As his character came more and more to be realized people began to say, “Well, that’s one young man Enoch Gib won’t break.”

Enoch regarded him with wonder and misgiving. John’s impact on the business had been phenomenal. Perhaps no one else could have done it; certainly no one else wasting so much of himself in ways for which Gib felt the utmost contempt could at the same time have attended to business at all. Yet his way with it grew steadily stronger and more remarkable, no matter what else he did.

Gradually there grew up in Gib a vague baffled sense of recurrence. As New Damascus had idolized Aaron in the old time so now it idolized John. Was that because he was Aaron’s son? For a while it had that aspect. Then it could no longer be so explained. Something that had been was taking place again. What was it? The old man came to this question again and again. It tormented him for a year of nights. Then suddenly he had the answer.

New Damascus idolized this person not because he was Aaron’s son but because he was Aaron!

Once this wild thought had occurred to Enoch it expanded rapidly, filling his whole mind, and became an obsession. Aaron lived again! He had returned with youth and strength restored.

The physical resemblance was in fact very striking. Enoch began to study it surreptitiously. The sight tortured and fascinated him. He could not let it alone. He decided he had been mistaken about that look of Esther which at first he had seemed to see in the young man’s eyes. It was not there. Thank God for that. This youth was Aaron himself.

From the moment of perceiving this thing with hallucinated clarity Enoch hated John and arranged his thoughts to dwell against him dangerously. How should he deal with the situation? It had no tangibility. If he spoke of it people would think he was crazy. Yet there was the fact. Aaron by foul strategy had entered the business again. The circumstances of his entering it in the guise of a son were extraordinary. As the old man reviewed the incident it assumed a flagrant, preposterous aspect. Aaron had outwitted him.

Yes. Aaron had always been able to do that. But this was an outrageous act! Nothing like it had ever happened before in the world. And now it behooved him to act cautiously, think cunningly, and above all to conceal the fact that he knew. Merely again to put Aaron out of the business, as he could easily do, would be neither quittance nor justice.

XV

There was much curiosity about Enoch’s invisible daughter. Was she really imprisoned in that gloomy mansion on the west hill? Or was she queer, like her mother? How did she live? What was she like? The mill workers, passing the house at all hours, were said to have seen her walking in the landscape at twilight. There was also a legend that she was beautiful.

The young Quality Street set with whom John played and danced talked itself into a state of romantic feeling about her. There was competition in fanciful suggestions. One was that twenty of them should become a committee and move in a body on the mansion. What could the ogre do then? Only of course nothing so overt could really be done. Besides, that would be too serious, not mad enough, and the prisoner might turn out badly. Nobody knew what kind of person she was. Whatever they did should be something to which she assented beforehand.

The suggestion that did at length unite all silly young heads was this. They would give her a party. That was a natural thing to do. She was a New Damascus girl, wasn’t she? There was no reason in the world why they shouldn’t give her a party. It was perfectly feasible in social principle. The difficulties, as an engineer would say, were merely technical. They were awkward nevertheless. How should they ask her? And if she were unable to bring herself, as would certainly be the case, how should they get her? They appealed to John. He was responsive. It appealed to his spirit of reckless frivolity. He undertook offhand to bring Agnes Gib to a party. It might take some time. He would tell them when and where.

First he made a reconnaissance of the enemy’s position. It had its vulnerable points, one of which was an Irish gardener with a grouch on the place. Beginning with him and working in, John proceeded to corrupt the Gib menage. He learned that Agnes was confined to that part of the mansion in which her mother had been immured. She was not permitted to go out, except to walk in the grounds with a woman who was Gib’s servant, not hers, and performed the office of a gaoler.

In time he succeeded in getting a note to the prisoner. In it he said simply that she was desired to come to a party. There was no answer.

He sent a second note. The party he had mentioned before was one proposed to be held in her honor. There would be introductions, then supper and dancing, informal but all very correct and duly chaperoned. Still no answer.

He sent a third note in which for the first time he recognized deterrent circumstances. However, all difficulties should be overcome. She had only to consent. Then a way would be found. The young set of New Damascus was very anxious to get acquainted with her, hence this friendly gesture. To this was returned a note, unsigned, as follows:

“Miss Gib thanks Mr. Breakspeare and his friends and regrets to say she cannot come.”

That was more or less what John by this time was expecting. He was not discouraged, but he needed light on the young person’s character and it occurred to him in this need to explore Gearhard the blacksmith, her grandfather. He melted the hoary smith’s ferocity of manner, which was but a rickety defence of the heart, by taking him headlong into the plot with an air of unlimited confidence. Gearhard at first worked his bellows furiously and stirred the fire in his forge, pretending to be angrily absent. But the strokes of the sweep-pole gradually diminished, the fire fell, the bellows collapsed with a rheumatic commotion, and he stood in his characteristic attitude of contemplation, listening. When he spoke his voice was remote and gentle.

“She won’t,” he said. “That’s all there’s into it. She’s as proud as that bar of steel.”

Youth understands its own. It knows the chemistries of impulse and how to challenge them. Curiosity overcomes pride, shyness and fear; and if it be touched through the arc of vanity all else is forgiven, for the desire of youth to be liked for itself alone, in the sign of its personableness, is a glowing passion.

What followed was absurd. Youth delights in high absurdities. It has a way with them that wisdom pretends to have forgotten. Away wisdom! You spoil the cosmic sorceries.

John sent another note.

It was to this effect. At the south boundary where the boxwood grew he would be waiting Thursday evening. She would have only to come straight on fifty paces more instead of turning in her walk at that point as her habit was, and the frolic would begin.

There was no answer. He expected none. But on Thursday evening he was there. From where he stood behind the boxwood he could see all that part of the grounds in which she walked. She appeared at the usual time, attended by a powerful looking woman who disliked exercise and made heavy work of it. Their relations were apparently hostile. They never spoke. The girl was supercilious; the woman grim. After a while the woman sat on an iron bench. The girl walked to and fro. Twice she came within a stone’s throw of the boxwood and turned back. Once she stood for several minutes, looking slowly up and down the boundary line of hedge and stone, and at the sky, and all around, with a wilful blind spot in her eye. She did not for an instant look seeingly at the spot her mind was focussed on. Yet John, who watched her, knew she sensed his presence there. That was all that happened. She presently went in without notice to the woman, who saw her going toward the house and followed.

John sent another note. A second time he waited. This time she changed her walk in oblique relation to the boxwood and finished it without the slightest glance or impulse in that direction.

There was a third time. And that was different. On the first turn she came closer to the boxwood than ever before, closer still on the second turn, and then, when the gaoler woman had become inert on the bench, she came within speaking distance and sat on the grass.

“We are here,” said John.

“Who are we?” she asked.

This was parley.

“I am their deputy,” he said. “Constructively they are here. Naturally, all of us couldn’t come at one time and—” He stopped. She wasn’t the kind of girl he was expecting. She embarrassed his style.

“And hide in the hedge,” she said, finishing his sentence. “Why not? It wouldn’t be any less rude if twenty did it.”

“That isn’t fair,” he said. “We don’t mean to be rude. We only want to get you out.”

“You think I couldn’t get out by myself if I wanted to?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what we thought. It’s so, isn’t it?”

She framed a reply, but withheld it, or, rather, she bit it in two and threw it away, symbolically. It was a clover stem. She sat on her feet, bent over, plucking at the grass, with an occasional glance at the woman on the bench.

“Do you think it’s nice to spy on a girl as you have been doing?” she asked.

“Very nice,” he said, to tease her.

“And is this the way you get girls for your parties?”

“May we drive up to your door and ask for you there?”

“You may.”

“Then will you come?”

“No, I won’t be home.”

“Why not?”

“I won’t. That’s why not.”

“Do you dislike parties?”

“Yes.”

“Do you hate people?”

“I hate people who feel sorry for me.”

“Do you wish me to go away?”

“Not if you like what you are doing.”

“I’m not doing this because I like doing it,” he answered. “I’m doing it because I was asked.”

“Oh,” she said.

“They felt—I mean, they had this friendly impulse to give you a party. They didn’t know how to get you and asked me to manage it. Now what shall I say to them? Shall I say you hate parties and wish them to mind their own business?”

“Tell them what you like,” she said. “I can’t talk to you any longer,” she added. “It will be noticed.”

“I won’t tell them anything,” he said. “But I’ll be here a week from tonight at this time if it doesn’t rain, and the week after that if it does, and every week for the rest of the summer until you say positively you will not come.”

“Haven’t I said that?” she asked.

“No.”

She got up, shrugged her shoulders and walked away.

Silly!... Silly!... Silly!...

That was what John kept saying to himself without subject or predicate. It was the way he felt. The situation was absurd. His part in it was ludicrous. They were all a lot of sillies,—save one. What he really minded was the sense of having come off badly with her. She was not the wistful, longing prisoner people imagined her to be. He could not make out precisely what she was. She was under restraint. Not only had she not denied this; she had treated it as a fact. But her attitude seemed to be simply that it was nobody’s business. Meddling was unwelcome. And such puerile interference as he represented had been treated as it deserved, with high disdain. Never had he met a girl with so much bite and tang. Well, however, it was not all to the bad. She might have cut him away clean. Instead, she had left it as it was.

“I think she will come,” he said to his friends.

“Have you seen her?” they asked.

“Yes. I’ve talked to her.”

“Oh, what is she like?”

“Like a grain of salt,” he said, rather absently.

At this several girls looked at him anxiously, and although they pretended to be as keen as ever for the party, even more than before, still, misgivings assailed them and secretly their enthusiasm fell. John was an unenclosed infatuation on which everyone had rights of commonage. Numbers preserved him. And here he was keeping tryst with a girl they knew nothing about. It was not his fault. But it was too romantic.

Another thing youth knows is that there are sudden, leaping, dare-me-not moments, wild moments of yes, in which the most improbable events come naturally to pass. It did not rain Thursday. John waited in the boxwood. She came slowly, in the magnetized direction, went back, returned, loitered about for some time, then sat on the grass again.

“Aren’t you ashamed to be standing there?” she asked.

“I feel a perfect fool,” he said.

“Oh, do you?” she retorted, and with not another word she rose and walked away.

Whistling softly John departed. It became interesting. Thursday he was there again, and so was she.

“Then why do you do it?” she asked, resuming the conversation at the point where she broke it, as if a week had not elapsed.

“I’ve told you why,” he said. “Can you see me?”

“No.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I didn’t. Only that you said you would be,” she answered.

“That meant last Thursday,” he said.

“Do you mean to annoy me like this all summer?”

“As long as you will come to talk with me,” he said.

“Or until I say positively I won’t come to the party. That’s what you said before.”

“Will you come?” he asked.

So they went on in a spirit of banter, touching invisible strings, attending less and less to the meaning of words and more to the language of sound.

Scientists ask: Is there such a thing as biactinism?—vital animal magnetism, producing an effect apart from itself with no mechanical means of transmission? Is personality radio-active? Does the human organism possess the property of radiating an influence capable of acting at a distance upon another human organism? Ask youth.

The barrier gave way the next week.

John dwelt as usual in the boxwood. The girl was tardy. Portent one. She wore a pretty dress and high heeled French boots. Portent two. She was on terms of amiability with the gaoler woman. Portent three. It was a musky, August evening, coming twilight. For half an hour or more she walked in an aimless, listless way, stopping, starting, plucking here and there a flower until she had a handful, and then with steps unhurried, with still an air of sauntering, she came straight on.

“Oh, here you are,” she said, in the cool, entrancing way youth has of doing an audacious thing.

“I’ll have to hand you down,” said John.

Below them in the road, twenty paces off, a horse and buggy waited.

XVI

The party took place in John’s rooms. First there was a dainty supper; then dancing. It was a heart breaking failure. Everyone tried to save it. A party that needs to be saved is already hopeless. The more everyone tried the worse it was until the lovely, dark-eyed little matron who chaperoned it was on the verge of tears, the girls were divided between sulks and hysterics and the men wondered vaguely what was wrong. It was inevitable. The fluids were perverse.

In the first place, the guest of honor flatly declined the rôle of Cinderella. She was not in the least grateful. The little matron on receiving her said: “We’ve tried so long to get you.”

What could be more innocent.

She replied, “Oh-h!” with ascending accent.

The wreck began there. The matron’s tone and manner revealed to her the light in which she was regarded. She was an object of curiosity and a subject of commiseration. One figure she hated as much as the other. To be pitied—particularly that,—was intolerable. She was stung with chagrin and humiliation. It was nobody’s fault,—at least, no more theirs than her own. She might have known it would be so; she had placed herself in this position. None the less, or perhaps all the more for that reason, she could not help behaving in that way which is meant when one says she took it out of them. She took it out of her own sex of course. Her power to do that was extraordinary.

The matron did not know what next to say. That was generally the trouble. None of the women knew how to talk to her. There was nothing in common to talk about, except the circumstances, and these could not be mentioned. At the slightest reference to them she coldly cut the conversation.

“If she couldn’t get into the spirit of it why did she come at all?” one girl asked another.

“That’s easy to see, I should think,” the other said.

What was easy to see was that she was too good looking. No other girl was anywhere near so attractive to the male principle. That was why she could carry off a reckless part. She became more heedless and dangerous about it as the psychic tension increased. She did not care in the least what happened.

It was nothing she did,—nothing you could isolate as an example and criticise. Her behavior was basically naïve. It was what she was. It was what she had been for thousands of threaded years. It was life at a pitch of intensity, life of a certain quality, looking out of her eyes, seeking itself.

“Don’t you see what she is doing?” asked a feline girl, speaking to John in the dance.

“No,” he said. “I don’t see what she is doing. I see only that you are treating her badly. I suppose it can’t be helped.”

“She’s having a very good time, all the same,” the girl retorted.

Most of the young men felt as John did and took pains to keep her supplied with attention. She received it not ungraciously, but lightly, with an amused and cynical smile. She seemed to be saying to herself: “All grapes are a little sour.”

The party was rapidly approaching a state of distress when a call for Mr. Breakspeare was handed in from the office. He went out. A feeling of suspense went all around. It seemed only at that moment to have occurred to anyone that there might reasonably be some sort of sequel. John returned in ten minutes, claimed his partner and entered the dance as if nothing had happened. But there was an uneasy look on his face. When the dance was over he went about looking for someone. Then he began to ask.

No one had seen her go. She had taken no leave. She had simply vanished.

When the fact was definitely established John excused himself and went in pursuit. He hoped to overtake her on the road home, supposing, as was true, that she had scented trouble and wished to meet it alone. That much of her character he understood. His anxiety was real.

The man who had called for him at the inn was no other than his corrupted gardener. And what he had come to say was that whoever brought the young lady home had better be careful. He would do much better not to bring her at all. For Enoch Gib, in waiting with a blunderbuss, yearned to abate his existence.

“An’ he is after findin’ out who be takin’ th’ young laday away,” the news bringer said at the end of his tidings.

All that had happened might have been foreseen if anyone had been thinking of consequences.

When the gaoler woman discovered that Agnes was gone the first thing she did was to go to her room and search it. She found John’s notes—all of them. As the whole exhibit made too strong a case against her gaolership she destroyed all but the last two. These, which referred only to the surreptitious meetings at the boxwood, she took to Enoch, saying she was sure from certain other evidence that it was not an elopement but an escapade. Agnes would return before daylight.

The result upon Enoch may be imagined.

This was Aaron again,—the same Aaron who stole Esther away from him. The terrible wound fell wide open. The pain of it wrecked his mind. It would have killed him, perhaps, but for the solacing thought that revenge was near.

So John pursued Agnes, Agnes was lost, and Enoch, waited with death in his heart.

XVII

Agnes expected to be followed.

Instead of going directly home she made a wide detour, skirting the town, and ascended the west hill obliquely by a path the mill workers used. Nobody would think to look for her there.

She meant to enter the grounds by the main gate, defiantly, but she would take her time. As for the consequences,—well, the worse the better. Any change would be welcome.

What made the feud with her father unendurable was its monotony. She had meant to fight it out with him alone to the end, with no outside help or interference. That was the true impulse of her nature. But it had begun to be like fighting it out with some colossal stone image. What terrified her was nothing he did, or could do, but the sheer glacial mass of his hostility. No,—not hostility. It was something else. It was a kind of malevolent indifference.

The feud was about nothing. It rested on their mutual obstinacy. A word would deliver her. That word she could not utter, or would not, which is all the same matter.

At school she had been one of ten girls suspected of having taken part in a frolic much more exciting than wicked yet deserving the extreme penalty. The nine denied it. When she was asked she said yes, she had done it. When they asked who the others were she refused to tell. They disciplined her. Still she refused. They offered her immunity if she would tell. She refused all the more. They sent for her father. He rashly said he would make her tell, and walked head-on into an impassable wall. After an hour alone with her in the reception room he marched her off, just as she was, saying as he crossed the threshold that her things were to be sent after her. Defiance was something he knew little about. Disobedience he could not comprehend at all. All the way home he pondered it.

“I understand why you refuse to tell on the others,” he said. “Now I waive that. You do not have to tell on them. But you shall tell me you are sorry.”

She wouldn’t. She would say she was wrong; she had broken rules. But she would not say she was sorry, for the reason that she wasn’t. This she explained. That made no difference.

“You shall tell me you are sorry,” he said.

She refused.

“You will,” he said. “When you do you may have your liberty again.”

With that he banished her beyond the white line that had divided the household in her infancy, set a woman to be her keeper, and then apparently forgot her. She sometimes saw him at a distance. He never looked at her.

The girls on whom she would not tell sent her a beautiful present. She sent it back. That was the last of her contacts with the outside world. Her mail was cut off. No one was permitted to see her. More than a year had passed in this way. Once she sent word she wished to see him. He answered: “If she is sorry she may come.” That ended her overtures. Fighting it out with him apparently meant living it out, as her mother did, and that for her was grotesque. Besides, in that kind of contest he had the advantage of age. Age has all the time there is. Youth has neither past nor future,—only the present. The situation was impossible. It could not go on. Yet she had found no clear way out. She was too proud to seek refuge with anyone she knew. Moreover, she was a minor with no rights of her own. And as for casting herself free upon the wide world,—well, she had not yet come to that desperate thought.

As she ascended the hill a mood that had been rising in her for several days became suddenly intense and exulting. It made her short of breath. The excitement of breaking bounds, of going to the party, of what she did there, now a feeling of utter contempt for all the human values it represented, an emotion of trampling upon her adversaries among whom to her surprise was foremostly John, a sense of unknown power, particularly that voluptuous unconcern with consequences—all these different actions and reactions were as one effect. The cause was the mood. She recognized it. She knew about how long it should last. Never before had it been so tormenting. Never had she let it possess her entirely. Surrendering to it was like a physical experience, fearful and sweet.

She sat on a stone at the edge of the path, on the lower side, with a wide view of the valley and gave herself up to ecstasy. She was attuned to wonder and understood it. The hymn of night bewitched her. Becoming luminous, her thoughts touched objects and subjects alike and returned to her charged with sensation. In the vastness of space, in one’s impulse toward it, in the thrust of the church spire through the black panoramic foliage, in the tearing way the moon sliced his path through the clouds, in the shapes of the clouds, in convexity, concavity, temptation, and selfness, in hereness and thereness, in all that one saw and felt there was one meaning,—and she almost knew what it was. But the thought that excited her to suffocation was the thought of all that had not yet happened to her,—in that same one meaning. The rest of her, most of her in fact, was out there in the void. It was everything that had not happened. It might be anything. Whatever it was she embraced it, accepted it unreservedly, consented to it beforehand for the thrill of consenting.

For the first time in her existence she felt knowingly the passion of youth to pierce itself with life.

XVIII

There came a sound of footsteps on the path,—that plunging sound of muffled resonance men make in iron-studded raw hide footgear, with also in this case a swishing minor note from the play of the ankle aprons worn by the mill workers. Agnes had never heard any sound like it. Not until two men met and passed in the path, so close that she could smell them, did she quite make out what it was; and by that time her heart was making more noise than the men’s feet. They did not see her. They passed without speaking to each other, which was strange for mill workers; but when they had walked maybe twenty paces in opposite directions one cast a taunt backward over his shoulder. What it was Agnes could not tell. The other answered it. Both stopped. Then she heard them slowly returning.

They met again at the same spot where they had passed and stood there looking at each other warily, suspiciously, their eyes rolling in the moonlight. She could see them distinctly, for they were very close, yet as it happened she herself was so concealed that the men, though they might have touched her, did not see her.

One had a very pleasing aspect. He was tall and vibrant with a fine profile and no bristles. That was Alex Thane, the magnificent puddler.

The other was of lower stature, much heavier, massive, in the form of a wedge, with a width at the top across the shoulders that was almost a deformity. He was neckless. His head started from between his shoulders like a gargoyle. Coarse black hair grew all over him. His moustache was like a worn brush. His eyes were wide apart, set very high, denoting enormous animal vitality.

It was he who had cast back the taunt; and it was he with his chin thrust out who spoke first when they met again and stood facing each other in that singular way. He was a Cornishman. What he said Agnes could not understand. Thane answered him in words which, though she knew them as words, most of them, imported to her mind no sense whatever. Still she got the drift of what they were saying, for they said a good deal of it in a universal language more gleaming and subtle than the language of words. She got it from their tones and gestures and what radiated from their eyes. And it was the drift of what men have been saying to each other from the beginning.

First it was, “Which of us can kill the other?”

After a very long time, millions of years maybe, it became, “Which of us could kill the other?”

That was the leap that placed an abyss between man and animal. No creature but man exists on this side. The animals still say can. He says could. It was the beginning of civilization. And all that we have done since has been to elaborate the ways of could, ways to conquer without killing, and to evolve the sporting code in which the potentials of could are standardized. According to that code one may acknowledge that another could have killed him without losing one’s life, one’s self-esteem or one’s social caste.

These two, Thane and the Cornishman, had been egged by their fellows into a state of intense rivalry. They were the most powerful men in the mill. Each in his daily work easily performed feats of strength beyond the power of others, but with this difference, that while Thane exerted himself only now and then for the mere feeling of it and the sooner when no one was watching, the Cornishman exhibited his superiority continuously because his vanity required it, and set a killing pace for the men of his crew. He was brutal and laughed exultingly if one of them dropped.

There was much debate as to which was the better man. A majority inclined to the Cornishman for that he was always and instantly ready to try it out, whereas Thane put every challenge aside, not as if he were afraid but with an air of distaste.

“I’m making no show of myself,” he said.

“Show be damned,” the eggers said. “The man is braggin’ he can do yu. Ain’t that a show?”

No use. He could not be goaded into a public match. Many misunderstood it. The Cornishman particularly was misled. He got the notion that Thane was afraid of him, and so he became arrogant and offensive.

This is what had been going on for some time. It was what was going on now in the path to the great wonder of a special, fascinated audience of one.

The Cornishman, jutting his chin piece further and further out, did the boasting. Thane answered him with contemptuous looks and now and then a derisive word. Suddenly they brought it to a head. As with one impulse they walked a little apart, put down their dinner baskets, threw off their caps and slipped out of their shirts. This seemed all one movement. Then, facing at the same instant, they drew slowly together. Their bodies, nude to the middle, were crouched in a manner that gave Agnes a new and terrific sensation of the human form, especially of its splendid, destructive power. Each had his left arm upraised and bent, as if to guard his face and head, and in their eyes the lust of combat glistened.

Agnes was transfixed with horror and at the same time thrilled as she had never been thrilled in her life before. No excitement she had ever imagined, waking or dreaming, was remotely comparable to this. She perhaps could not have run if she had tried; she would not have tried if she had thought of it. She thought of nothing. She sat perfectly still, her mouth hard set, her hands clenched, a look in her eyes she would not have believed in her own mirror.

The fighters seemed to pursue each other slowly in a small circle, eye to eye, sparring a little, and Agnes gasped with delight. They moved with the fluid ease and unconscious grace of leopards, and gave the same impression of tense coiled strength. She had not the faintest idea hitherto that the man thing could be like this.

Then, so swiftly that she did not see it, the first clean blow went in, with the sound of a butcher’s cleaver falling on the block. The effect of that sound upon Agnes was tremendous. She felt a swooning of worlds in the pit of her stomach. Solids were fluid. Her moorings gave way. Nothing in her experience of men had prepared her for the possibility of this. She had seen below the surface. The surface would never be the same again. What an awful sound! She felt she could not bear to hear it again; yet she listened for it breathlessly, frantically.

She saw blood on the tall one’s face. That did not make her sick. It made her violently partisan. She has been so all the time without knowing it. Thought of the heavy brute winning was intolerable. She could not see his face distinctly, for he crouched much lower than his antagonist and looked out from under his shaggy eyebrows, thus presenting the top of his head. When by accident, however, his face did come into full view she was relieved to see that he was bleeding freely. The tall one in fact was not bleeding at all. It was the other’s blood transferred to him. And then, as she saw how it was really going, she beat her knees with her fists and could hardly restrain the impulse to cry out.

The Cornishman was Thane’s equal in strength and vitality and forced the fighting at first with ferocious onsets. But he was as a bull against a tiger. His blows, falling short or going wild, landed always where his enemy precisely was not. Thane, doing it thoughtfully, planted his blows unerringly. He let the Cornishman come to him so long as he would and simply cut him to pieces, keeping some of himself all the time in reserve.

The end came in that instant when Thane really exerted himself. The Cornishman changed his tactics. He stopped lunging, stood on the defensive, and waited for Thane to come to him.

In this attitude it happened that the Cornishman’s back was to Agnes, not squarely, but only slightly oblique. Therefore, she had a fair full view of Thane as he came toward the Cornishman. The cool, easy purposefulness of him agitated her in a most extraordinary way. She knew he had won.

He walked straight into the Cornishman’s guard and without any feint or pass he did two things at once with such amazing swiftness that the eye could not follow. With his left hand he put aside the Cornishman’s defending arm and with his right he hit him, on the point of his offensive chin, a blow the sound of which was like the snapping of a great tree trunk on the knee of a windstorm.

For an instant nothing happened, except that Thane folded his arms and stood looking seriously at the Cornishman. Then the Cornishman’s arms fell, his form swayed, and he began to go around in a circle, faster and faster, as if one leg at each step became shorter and was letting him down in spite of his efforts to overtake his balance. He was going to fall. Where?

The battle had taken place all at one side of the path where a level space was. From the other side of the path, where Agnes was, the ground pitched off. The stone on which she sat was two feet below the level of the path. The grass concealed her head.

The spinning Cornishman was almost in the path, directly above her. It seemed probable that he would fall in a heap, pitching forward. It was incredible that he should catch himself up; yet he did it with a mighty effort, stopped spinning, stood upright for a moment, then unexpectedly toppled backward over the edge of the path and fell with all his weight upon Agnes.

She screamed and tried to parry the awful mass. It bore her under and she rolled with it a little distance down the hillside. Before she was free of it she saw above her the face of Thane, white and scared.

He picked her up, all of her, bodily, as if she were a doll, carried her back to the path, and stood her on end experimentally.

“Hurt?”

“No,” she said, grimacing with pain.

“You are,” he said. “Let’s see you stand up.”

He let go of her and she began to go over.

“My ankle,” she said. “It got a little twist. Let me sit down.”

Having lowered her gently to a sitting posture he got down on his knees and regarded her anxiously.

“That all? Just the ankle?”

“I’ll be all right in a minute or two,” she said. Pointing to the vanquished lump she asked: “What about him?”

“That?” he said. “Don’t worry. It ain’t dead. It’ll come to after a bit.”

Her breath was in her throat and her mind was filled with after images of the event. She was still outside of herself with excitement.

“I was on your side,” she said naïvely. Some secret thought then touched her and she doubled up with a tickled sound. Her suppressed feelings were exploding.

Thane at that moment realized that she had witnessed the fight. Next he became painfully conscious of himself. He felt a burning sensation from his middle to the roots of his hair; and as he rose and went looking in the grass for his shirt his movements were awkward, almost clumsy. Having found his shirt he walked a long way off to put it on. When he returned he had the Cornishman’s shirt. That hulk of vanity was beginning to stir as from a deep sleep. Thane helped him to his feet, set him in the path with his face averted, put the garment in his hands, and earnestly desired him to disappear.

Then he stood looking down at Agnes. A moment before they had been as free and natural as children. Now they were false, self-embarrassed.

“How is it now?” he asked.

“Better,” she said.

Silence.

“Maybe you could rub it.”

“It’s getting all right,” she said.

More silence.

“My name is Alexander.”

“My name is Agnes,” she replied.

Silence again.

“Agnes what?”

“Gib,” she said.

“You old Enoch’s girl?” he asked.

She did not answer.

“Was you cuttin’ it?” he asked.

“Was I what?”

“Givin’ ’im the slip?”

“I’m on my way home,” she said. “Please don’t bother any more about me. I’m quite all right now.”

Her manner had changed. Her tone was formal and dismissive. Thane moved away from her, uncertain what to do, looked about in the grass for his lunch basket, found it, stood for some minutes twirling it in his hands, and slowly came back.

“Better’d let me take you home.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I know my way home.”

“It ain’t no place for you out here. Them from the mill is all right, but these new miners, they go back ’n forwards singing and fighting. They’d scare you most to death ... or worse.”

She was looking off into the valley and made no reply.

“Better’d let me take you home.”

“Please,” she said, “I don’t wish to be taken home.”

“Ain’t you got to go home?”

To this her only answer was an exasperated shrug of the shoulders. All he could see of her was the expression of her back and it was so unfriendly that it took everything out of him but the doggedness. He waited until it was evident she did not mean to speak again. Then he walked about in a fumble of perplexity and at length threw himself on the grass and comfortably lighted his pipe.

After a while she spoke without turning her head.

“Are you there for the night?”

“Jus’ standing by,” he said. “Can’t leave you here like you was a cripple bird.”

Agnes was secretly entertained. She had also a feeling of being wonderfully safe. Yet the absurdity of her predicament filled her with chagrin. She hated to be helpless. “I can walk,” she said to herself. “I will.”

She got up, took one step bravely and came down again with an involuntary cry of pain.

At that Thane rose with a fixed intention, knocked his pipe clean on his heel, dropped it in his pocket, and came toward her, hitching at his belt. She knew intuitively what he meant to do and felt herself for an instant in the place of the Cornishman as he stood waiting for Thane to come and finish him.

He did not speak. Leaning over, he picked her off the ground and settled her high in his arms.

First she was furiously angry. Her thoughts were: “How dare you! Put me down instantly and be gone.” The words did not come. She noticed how lightly he carried her, almost as if he were not touching her, and how easily he walked. She was helpless. If she resisted he would only hold her differently and go steadily on. She could scream or struggle. To scream would be childish. She had not the least inclination to scream. And to struggle would be futile. So she took refuge in passivity. Then sensations began to assail her. She was suddenly afraid. Fear was an emotion she seldom experienced. Never had she been afraid like this. What she was afraid of she did not know. She was not sure it was fear. It was more like the thrill one gets in a high swing from the thought, “What if the rope should break!” or in the phantasy of taking the place of the animal trainer, from the thought, “What if the lion should turn!” She remembered not the words but the sense of a line of Greek poetry about maidens swooning from fear of finding that which not to find would grieve them unto death.

She was still herself, Agnes, furiously angry at being carried without her consent. At the same time she was not Agnes. The Agnes she knew was but a name and a memory. She herself, now existing originally, was someone whose only desire was to be carried further, faster, higher, off the edge of the world. She breathed deeply, inhaling his odor.

Seeing that he should carry her more easily if her weight were somewhat distributed by her own effort she put an arm around his neck. It tightened there as she suspended her weight to relieve his arms. Then came an instant in which she was amazed at the impulse, which she restrained, to fasten the other arm about his neck. In the rough places he began to hold her a little closer each time and not to relax when it was smooth again. She was not aware of it. Her odor intoxicated Thane. Sometimes he lost the path and stumbled. That she did not notice. She listened to his breathing, counted it against her own, and felt the rythmic rise and fall of his powerful chest.

At a point where they turned out of the path through a piece of high grass to enter the highway both of them as it were came awake.

“Put me down, please,” she said in a low voice, hardly above a whisper,—a voice she did not know.

He apparently did not hear her.

They came to the great iron gate.

“Put me down,” she said again.

Still he seemed not to hear. With his foot he rattled the gate, calling in a loud, uncontrolled voice,—the voice of a man in danger—“Hey! Hey!” He was trembling all over.

Three times he rattled the gate and called. Twice he was answered only by the reverberations of his own clamor, which shocked the stillness of the night and left a vacant ringing in the ears. In the grass the crickets sang. Far away a dog barked once and a cock woke up. Each could hear the beating of the other’s heart.

What happened the third time was apparitional. Suddenly, there was Enoch, behind the gate, looking at them. He had been there all the time in the shadow of the wall. He held a lighted lantern. That also had been concealed. Slowly he raised the latch-bar and swung the gate ajar. Then he held the lantern high and gazed unbelievingly at Thane, who was the first to speak.

“Found her up there in the grass. Was having a bit of a tiff, two of us, me ’n the Cornishman, ’n he fell on her when I knocked him out, ’n hurt her ankle, hiding there so as nobody could see her. She couldn’t walk, so’s I brought her home.”

Agnes neither stirred nor spoke. In the light of the lantern her eyes gleamed with a trapped expression. Enoch did not look at her, not even on hearing that she was hurt, but continued to stare fixedly at his puddler, repeating after him: “In the grass.”

“Don’t you want her?” Thane asked.

At that Enoch lowered the lantern, swung the gate open and stood aside.

“Take her in,” he said.

As the puddler passed, Enoch closed and barred the gate; he followed them up the driveway toward the mansion. The only sound was the crunching of the two men’s feet on the gravel.

Then Enoch laughed. It was an abominable sound, denoting a cruel conclusion in his mind. Agnes shuddered. Her hold around the puddler’s neck involuntarily tightened. So did his hold of her. Thus a subtle sign passed between them. Neither one spoke.

At the entrance Enoch overtook them, opened the door, and walked ahead. There were no servants in sight. In this household servants appeared when summoned and never otherwise.

“In here,” said Enoch, opening the hall door into the back parlor on the ground floor. This was his side of the house. The room was dimly lighted. The puddler put his burden down on a couch and turned to look at Enoch, who stood in the doorway.

“Stay here, both of you, until I return,” he said. With that he closed the door and turned the key from the outside.

Thane in his mill clothes,—iron studded shoes, ankle aprons, trousers, shirt open to the middle of his chest, and cap,—was bewildered and overcome with conscious awkwardness. He looked at things as if they might bark at him and stood with his weight on one leg, having no use for the other. It stuck out from him at a great distance, and terminated absurdly in a performing foot, rocking on its heel and wearing a place in the varnished surface of the floor.

Agnes, who had been straining her faculties to hear what might be taking place outside, became aware of his distress.

“Please sit down and listen,” she said. “Over there,” pointing to an arm chair.

They heard the jangling of bells, the opening and closing of doors, and presently a carriage went off in haste. It must have been waiting. There had not been time to harness a team. Then faintly they heard footsteps patrolling the hallway. They were Enoch’s.

“I haven’t any idea what I’ve got you into,” said Agnes.

“Seem’s it ain’t ready yet,” he said, and smiled at her.

His smile was a revelation, swift and unexpected, like an event in a starlit sky. Agnes had not seen it before. It gave her a start of joy. She smiled back at him and then blushed. That made her angry. She was always angry at herself for blushing because it gave her away. Her defense was to look at him steadily and that made him self-conscious again. She had discovered that when his thoughts were dynamically engaged, or when his mind was intended to action, instantly all awkwardness left him. Then he was graceful unawares, as children and animals are, never thinking of themselves. She could not bear to see him fidget.

“You don’t seem to care,” she said.

“He bears down hard on you, don’t he, Enoch?” he asked.

“His nature is hard,” she said.

“Maybe you was cuttin’ it an’ here I brought you home. Ain’t that so?”

“No,” she said.

He came half way across the room and regarded her earnestly.

“If that’s it, it ain’t too late now. I’ll take you anywhere you want.” As she did not answer, he added: “Jus take ’n leave you there so’s you need never see me again.”

“Thank you,” she said, gently. “That wouldn’t be nice, would it,—never to see you again after that? No. I’m—what was it you said?—I’m standing by.”

He sat down again, disappointed.

“I must tell you what happened,” she said. “I broke out and went to a party in town. That isn’t allowed. I expected a scene when I got home. It might have been very disagreeable for the—for my escort, you know. So, having first run away to go to the party, I next ran away from the party and started home alone. You know the rest.”

“Oh,” said Thane, thoughtfully.

A sudden constraint fell upon them. Their eyes did not meet again.

They were sitting in silence, she in reverie, when a sound of commotion was heard in the hallway. The carriage had returned. Double footsteps approached.

The door opened, admitting Enoch, and with him the Presbyterian minister, a clean, tame, ox-like man with a very large bald head, no eyebrows and round blue eyes. Enoch closed the door. Thane stood up. The minister looked first at him and then at Agnes. Her eyes were full of wonder, tinged with premonition. Enoch spoke.

“We found her in the grass. That’s the man. Marry them.”

The minister, regarding both of them at once in an oblique manner, began to nod his head up and down as if saying to himself, “Oh-ho! So this is what we find?”

Thane was slow to understand Enoch’s words. He had the look of a man in the act of doubting his familiar senses.

Agnes, very pale, lips slightly parted, nostrils distended, sitting very erect, turned her head slowly and gazed at her father. The muscles around her eyes were tense and drawn, her eyes were hard and partially closed as if the sun were in them, and she looked at him so until his countenance fell. But not his wickedness.

“Marry them,” he said.

Thane reacted suddenly. He cleared his throat, swallowed, glanced right and left, and took a step forward, with a tug at his belt.

“You’re supposing what ain’t so,” he shouted at Enoch. “What do you mean by that about finding her in the grass? What does that mean? Me ’n the Cornishman was racketing up there in the path like I told you at the gate. He ain’t come to yet, so there’s nobody can say as what happened but me ’n the girl. She oughten have seen it. That’s correct. But there ain’t no harm done—none as you could speak of. If you don’t believe me ask her.... You tell them,” he said, turning to Agnes.

“My father is mad,” she said.

Thane began to tell them what had passed on the path and became utterly incoherent. Despairing, he made a move toward Enoch. The minister raised his hand.

“What is your name?”

“Alexander Thane.”

Enoch, who had been standing with his back to the door, opened it, reached around the jamb and drew it back holding a shot gun, the barrel of which he rested on his left arm.

“Marry them, I tell you.” His voice was low. “Make it short.”

Thane made another move toward him. The minister raised his hand again,—a fat, white hand. It fascinated Thane and calmed him.

“Thane,” said the minister, “do you take this woman to be your lawful wife?”

“Not as he says it. Not for that shooting thing as he’s got there in his hand,” said Thane. “Not unless the girl wants it,” he added, as a disastrous and extremely complicated afterthought.

If he had flatly said no, the shape of the climax might have been different. There was no lack of courage. What stopped him was a romantic seizure.

The minister turned to Agnes.

“Will you, Agnes, take this man Thane to be your husband?”

The die was then in her hands. Thane had not meant to pass it. Gladly would he have retaken it if only he had known how to do so. The situation was beyond his resources. Moreover, the question—“Will you, Agnes, take this man Thane to be your husband?”—was so momentous to him that it deprived him of his wits and senses, save only the sense of hearing.

Emotions more dissimilar could scarcely be allotted to three men in a single scene, one of them mad, yet for a moment they were united by a feeling of awe and regarded Agnes with one expression. The woman’s courage surpasses the man’s. This he afterward denies in his mind, saying the difference is that she lacks a sense of consequences.

Agnes was cool and contemplative, and in no haste to answer. She kept them waiting. They could not see her face. Her head was bent over. With one hand she plucked at the pattern of her dress and seemed to be counting. Then slowly she began to nod her head.

“Yes,” she said, distinctly, though in a very far voice, “I will.”

“Stand up, please,” said the minister.

Thane made his responses as one in a dream. Hers were firm and clear, and all the time she was looking at her father as she had looked at him first, with those tight little wrinkles around her eyes.

So they were married.

“That’s all,” said Enoch, to the minister, curtly. “The carriage is at the door.”

The minister bowed and vanished.

Enoch drew a piece of cardboard from his pocket and handed it to Thane. It was a blue ticket,—the token of dismissal.

“Now go,” he said, “and let me never see you again.”

Agnes looked up at Thane.

“I can walk,” she said, taking him by the arm. It was so. She could, with a slight limp. Enoch, seeing it, sneered. He watched them walk into the night and closed the door behind them.

At the gate Thane said: “But you can’t,” and started to pick her up.

“Don’t,” she said.

They had changed places. She was no longer afraid of him. He was afraid of her.

XIX

All this time John had been seeking Agnes. First he went the high road to the mansion until he was sure she had not gone that way, for if she had he would have overtaken her. Turning back he began to make inquiries and presently heard of someone, undoubtedly she, who had been seen walking wide of the town, past the mill, toward the mountain. Knowing the path and divining her intention he walked in her footsteps.

The smell of Thane’s pipe was still in the air when he arrived at the place where the fight had taken place. A thing of white in the grass drew his eye. He picked it up and got a bad start. It was a tiny handkerchief. By the light of a match he made out the initials A. G. embroidered in one corner. Looking further he found a scarf that he instantly recognized. He had particularly noticed it on their way to the party. Now in a panic he began to examine the ground closely and discovered extensive evidence of a human struggle. Running up and down the path a short distance each way he came on the Cornishman’s shirt a little to one side where the groggy owner had tossed it away. To John’s disgust it was slimy with something that came off in his hands; as this proved to be blood his disgust gave way to horror.

Without actually formulating the thought, because it was too dreadful to be true, he acted under the tyranny of a fixed idea, which was that Agnes had met with a foul disaster. The possibility was real. Lately there had come to New Damascus a group of mill hands whose ways and morals were alien to the community. They were bestial drinkers and had been making a great deal of trouble.

In a state of frenzy he explored the mountain side, calling her name. His panic rising, it occurred to him to ask at the mill among the men who continually used the path. He found several who had been over it within a hour or so. Someone was missing, he told them. Something unknown had happened. Had they seen or heard anything unusual. They became individually contemplative, made him say it all over again, repeated it after him, thought very hard and shook their heads. Nobody had seen or heard the least thing strange. But somebody did, by a freak of intelligent association, remember the Cornishman. He was out there under the water tank, speechless and weeping, not caring whether Enoch saw him or not. Maybe something had happened to him.

John found him as indicated, with his face in his hands, water dripping on his naked back.

“What happened to you?” John asked, shaking him.

“Gotten m’dam head knocked off,” he groaned, without moving. It was a refrain running through him. John’s attack had made it once audible.

“Up there in the path?”

He grunted.

“Who was it?”

Faintly, though very definitely, the Cornwall beauty expressed a passionate desire to be let alone.

“Was there a girl?” John asked.

“Huh!” said the hulk, instantly penetrated by the sound of that word.

John repeated the question.

The Cornishman stirred painfully, sat up, turned a stupidly grinning face and nodded—yes.

“Who took her away?” John asked, thumping the body to keep the mind afloat. “Tell me,” he said, shaking him by the hair. “Where did they go?” he asked, kicking him in the shins.

But the Cornishman was either slyer or more stupefied than one could imagine. He relapsed. Nothing more could be got out of him.

There now was but one rational thing to do—report to Enoch and raise a general alarm.

From running hard with a load of dread John was almost spent when he arrived at the mansion gate. It was shut and barred; the house was dark and where he had expected to find alarm and commotion everything was strangely still. Foreboding assailed him. Thinking it might be quicker to open the gate than to climb the wall he put his hand through and began to fumble with the latch bar inside. He was so intent upon the effort that a certain indefinable sense one may have of another’s invisible proximity failed to warn him of Enoch’s presence.

There was a swift, noiseless movement in the darkness and a hand clutched him powerfully by the wrist. The physical disadvantage of his position made him helpless. Over the vertical bars of the gate ran a pattern of wrought iron ornamentation in the form of vine and leaves; the interstices were irregular, with sharp edges. It was impossible to use his free arm defensively because there was no other opening through which he could reach far enough in. Besides, if he resisted Enoch could instantly snap the bones of his trapped arm. He was utterly bewildered by the circumstances. Enoch’s gesture was menacing, even terrifying in its sinister precision, and yet John could scarcely imagine that his intentions were destructive. So he submitted his arm passively to the old man’s dangerous grip and spoke.

“It is I,” he said. His voice betrayed his spirit, which was at the verge of panic. Enoch did not speak. His hold tightened. “I was trying to let myself in to save time,” said John. “Agnes is lost. That is, I can’t find her. I was coming to tell you.”

Enoch still did not speak.

“Perhaps she is home,” said John. “Have you seen her? If you haven’t I’m afraid something has happened to her.”

The old man’s continued silence was unnatural and ominous. Slowly, purposefully, he drew John’s arm further in, to almost the elbow; it came to him unresistingly and bare, the cuffs of the coat and shirt having caught on the vine work outside. Then he began to explore it upward from the wrist, feeling through the flesh for the edges of the radius and ulna bones, passing them an inch at a time between his thumb and forefinger as if searching for something he was afraid to find. John’s arm had once been broken in a football game at school. There was a perceptible ridge in the radius bone at the point of fracture. On this ridge Enoch’s fingers stopped, lost their strength and began to tremble. At the same time the grip of his other hand around John’s wrist began to relax in a slow, involuntary manner.

“Aaron!” he whispered, awesomely.

The next instant John’s arm was free and there was the sound of a body falling on the gravel inside the gate.

Now John scaled the wall. He stopped to make sure Enoch was breathing and to ease his form on the ground; then he ran to the mansion. His furious alarm brought a stolid, dark woman to the door, holding a small oil light over her head.

“Is Miss Gib at home?” he asked.

The woman shook her head.

“Does anyone know where she is?”

In a dull manner the woman shook her head again.

“Mr. Gib has fallen at the front gate,” said John. “Go to him at once and send someone for the doctor.”

The woman put the lamp down on the floor where she stood and started alone down the driveway, running.

“Call the servants,” said John. “You may have to carry him in.”

But she went only faster. He followed her. Before he could overtake her she met Enoch. He could see them both clearly in the light streaming from the doorway. The woman looked at Enoch anxiously and made as if to touch him, solicitously. He did not exactly ignore her; he seemed not to see her at all and walked steadily on.

John turned out of the light and passed unobserved in the darkness. Then he ran headlong off the grounds, feeling at each step that his knees would let him down. His emotional state was almost unmanageable. The episode with Enoch at the gate had been not only very mysterious but fraught with some ghastly inner meaning to which he had no clue whatever. He knew nothing of Enoch’s obsession that he, John, was Aaron reincarnated. He had never heard of that boyhood contest in which Enoch broke Aaron’s arm. Therefore he could not know what it meant in Enoch’s troubled brain to find in the arm of Aaron’s son the scar of a similar fracture at almost precisely the corresponding place. To him it was the same scar in the same arm. It was the last thing needed to fix his hallucination and the discovery had momentarily overwhelmed his senses.