The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cinder Buggy, by Garet Garrett This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: The Cinder Buggy A Fable in Iron and Steel Author: Garet Garrett Release Date: October 30, 2019 [EBook #60593] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CINDER BUGGY *** Produced by Tim Lindell, Craig Kirkwood, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) Cover. 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. Publisher logo. 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? A THE CINDER BUGGY I 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.” [1] [2] [3] [4] “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?” [5] [6] [7] [8] “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. [9] [10] W II hen 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. [11] [12] [13] [14] N III owhere 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. [15] [16] [17] A IV aron 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 [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] 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 [23] [24] [25] [26] 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. [27] E V noch’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 [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] 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. [33] [34] [35]