The Cinder Buggy (24 page)

Knowing what difficulties lay in the path of the steel rail,—knowing them very well indeed, since many of them were of his own work,—John executed a brilliant preliminary maneuver. The point of it was to create his market beforehand. With that in view he persuaded the officials of several large railroads to take ground floor shares in the North American Steel Company. Its capitalization was increased for that purpose. Thus not only was capital provided toward the building of a great rail making addition to the plant but powerful railroad men now had a participating interest in the success of the steel rail.

Meanwhile others also had discovered true steel formulas. As usual in such cases many hands were pressing against the door. Once the latch is lifted the door flies open for everyone. And then it appears that all the time there were several ways to have done it. Thane’s way was not the only way. He had been the one to see where the cause of variableness lay. After that there could be several methods of casting it out. So the American Steel Company had competition almost from the start. However, as its rails were all bespoken by the railroads whose officials were stockholders, and as in any case the demand for rails was increasing very fast, there would have been prosperity for everyone if Enoch Gib had not been mad.

No sooner had the American Steel Company begun to produce rails than Enoch did with iron rails as he had done before with iron nails. He began to sell the famous Damascus iron rail at a ruinous price. The steel rail makers had to meet him. Then he lowered his price again, and again, and still again, all the time increasing his output, until there was no profit in rails for anybody.

John knew what it cost to make Damascus rails. Enoch was selling them actually at a loss.

The fact that puissant railroad officials were stockholders in the American Steel Company counted for less and less. Though they might prefer steel rails for both personal and intrinsic reasons, still they could not spend their railroad’s money for steel rails with the famous Damascus rail selling at a price that made it a preposterous bargain. There was a panic in Pittsburgh.

John’s emotions were those of Jonah riding the storm with an innocent face and a sense of guilt at his heart. He made no doubt that Enoch had set out deliberately to ruin the steel rail industry and would if need be commit financial suicide to accomplish that end. Nobody else knew or suspected the truth. John could not publish it.

Other steel rail makers quit. They could not stand the loss. And there it lay between Enoch and John. Enoch’s mind was governed by two passions. One was his hatred of steel. The other was his hatred of John, who symbolized
Aaron.
He had the advantage of a fixed daemonic purpose. His strength was unknown. How long he might last even John could not guess.

In the fight over nails John’s rule had been defensive. It had to be. But here there was choice. His resources now were so much greater that a policy of reprisals might be considered. If Enoch were determined to find his own breaking point the sooner the end the better for everyone else. The American Steel Company could slaughter rails, too, increasing both its own loss and Enoch’s, and thus foreshorten the agony. But when it came to the point of adopting an offensive course John wavered. He could not bring himself to do it. Never had he hated Enoch. So far from that, his feeling for him was one of unreasoning pity. The old man probably would not survive bankruptcy. It would kill him. “Therefore,” said John, “let him bring it about in his own time.”

And so it was that a lone and dreadful man, stalking day and night through the New Damascus iron mill like a tormented apparition, goading his men to the point of frenzy, using them up and casting them off, yet holding them to it by force of contempt for fibre that snapped,—that one man in a spirit of madness frustrated the steel age and made it to limp on iron rails long after the true steel to shoe it with had been available. In all the histories of iron and steel you read men’s blank amazement at the fact that it took so many years for the steel rail, once perfected, to supersede the iron rail. They cannot account for it.

At about this time a committee of New Damascus business men went forth to investigate the subject of steel. Enoch caused this to be done. His mood was one of exulting. Many had begun to believe that steel might overthrow iron. He was resolved to put that heresy down. He chose the right time. The committee going to and fro saw steel rail plants lying idle; it found the steel people in despair, terrorized by Enoch. It returned to New Damascus and saw with its own eyes on Enoch’s books how the output of iron rails was increasing. Who would go behind such evidence? The committee reported that steel would never supersede iron. Except perhaps in some special uses, iron was forever paramount. It adopted a resolution in praise of Enoch, who had made New Damascus the iron town it was, and disbanded.

The sun of New Damascus was then at its zenith and the days of Enoch were few to run. He lived them out consistently. No man saw him but in his strength. His weakness was invisible like his nakedness. His end was as that of the oak that once more flings back the storm, then suddenly falls of its own weight. Never had his power seemed so immeasurable as at its breaking point.

For all that John could or could not do, the American Steel Company came itself to the brink. It could not forever go on making steel rails at a loss. How far short of bankruptcy would it give up the struggle and stop? The rocks were already in sight. Seeing them clearly, John did not act. He stood still and waited as if fascinated. The longer he waited the more desperate was the chance of saving the company.

Its credit was sinking. All of this he saw. “Then what am I waiting for?” he would ask himself, and postpone the answer. Twice he had called the directors together to lay before them a plan of salvage, which was the abandon rail making and convert the plant to other uses; and each time at the last minute he changed his mind.

One morning at breakfast he was electrified by a single black line in his newspaper.

“Damascus Mill Closes”

Beneath it was this dispatch:

“New Damascus, June II.—The Damascus mill closed down last night in all departments for the first time in its history. There is no explanation. Enoch Gib is understood to be ill.”

John knew what this meant. The end had come. Having verified the news by telegraph he went to Slaymaker and told him for the first time enough of the history of New Damascus and its people to illuminate what had been going on.

“Why do you tell me this now?” Slaymaker asked.

“Isn’t it a great relief?” said John. “The ghastly game that’s nearly ruined us is at an end.”

“There’s some other reason,” Slaymaker insisted.

“You have lost a lot of money with me in American Steel,” John said. “Now of course it will all come back. Still, you might be able to turn this information to special advantage. There are two or three idle rail mills that could be picked up for nothing.”

Slaymaker took time to reflect.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll help.”

John shook his head.

“It’s an apple I don’t like the taste of. If I were in your place I’d know what to do. That’s why I have told you. But leave me out of it entirely.”

“I can’t for the life of me see why you shouldn’t,” said Slaymaker.

“Neither can I,” said John. “There’s no reason. Say I’m superstitious and let it drop.”

“There’s nothing the matter with the apple though?” asked Slaymaker.

“Not for you,” said John.

He left the banker on the edge of his chair. When he arrived at his own office Thane was there waiting.

“We’ve got a telegram Enoch is dying. Thought maybe as you would go along with us.”

“How does Mrs. Thane take it?”

“Cold and still,” said Thane. “But you can’t tell.”

“Does she want me to go?”

“She knows I’m asking you,” said Thane. “There’s just time. She’s at the depot.”

John turned and went with him.

I
T was six hours by train from Pittsburgh to New Damascus. The last hour was from Wilkes-Barre down the valley, the railway now running with the turnpike on which Agnes passed her wedding night between Thane and John over the flying heels of a pair of bays. Not one of them had seen it since. Surreptitiously watching for signs and landmarks they became silent and solitary. Memories in which they were intimately associated instead of drawing them together caused separate states of reverie.

Agnes sat at the window with her face averted. John and Thane were together in the opposite seat. Her eyebrows were a little raised, acutely bent and drawn together, and in her forehead was a Gothic cross. This muscular tension never for a moment relaxed, not even when she spoke and smiled. In her eyes was an expression of strained and baffled interrogation, inward looking.

Two years were gone since that night of John’s first supper with the Thanes in their trial abode. In this time she had changed at the base of her personality. The girl of her had vanished almost without trace.

What becomes of the being we have ceased to be?

That Agnes of the tantalizing armor, half of ice and half of flame, part disdain and part desire, who froze the impulse she provoked and singed the pride that saved her,—she was gone, entirely gone. This Agnes knew her not. This Agnes was a woman who knew bitterness and the taste of dust. When she had been ready... willing... dying... to give her pride to save her love the door was closed. The shop was dark.

The light went out that night she let him stand behind her chair in an agony of longing, pretending not to know he stood there, and then broke him with a hard, glissando “Y-e-s?” It was ominous that he did not respond from the top of the staircase to her careless goodnight. She regarded him particularly the next morning and began to wonder. Never again did he look at her in that way she ached for and dreaded. The more he didn’t look at her in that way the more she ached for it and the less she dreaded it, until she couldn’t remember why she had dreaded it and forgot why she had ever repulsed him.

She had repulsed because her vanity required it. He had got her to wife without wooing her. She had been thrust upon him. The thought was a sleepless scorpion in her breast. It poisoned her dreams. Well... but before he could touch her he should have to want her and prove it. She would attend to that. To reach her at all he should have to overcome a great barrier. This she resolved and so she repulsed him. Each hurt to his pride was a stone added to the barrier, and she set no limit to it, for the higher it was the more it would prove if he ever got over. Then she would see what her own feelings were.

He on his part, after that night, once and for all accepted the only inference he could draw from her behaviour. He was hateful to her; he filled her with loathing and disgust. Well... he could no more help that than he could help the fact of their being married: but he could avoid those moments on the rack. They left him limp and useless for days afterward. He could lock the impulse up. Its getting loose was what drew her scorn upon him. So he chained and locked it up.

At first, seeing the door was closed, she walked to and fro before it, thinking he would read in her manner a sign of remorse. He saw nothing. Then she began to knock. He did not hear. She thought he was making her pay. She was willing, even greedy, to pay. She went on knocking. Presently she realized that he was blind and deaf. In a panic she beat upon the door, hurled her weight against it, crying out her wish to surrender. But she had seared his heart. He could see only with his eyes and hear but with his ears, and totally misapprehended her woman’s gesture.

She imagined that now
he
repulsed HER, not in revenge, not to trample on her,—that she could easily have endured,—but coldly, with undesire.

This completed the irony. Thereafter she held aloof and began to fear him. She put away her glittering armor, staining it with tears of rage and chagrin, and he never noticed even that. He was always gentle, always absent, always cold. He grew on her in this aspect, assumed colossal proportions, and began to seem as inaccessible to her as she had seemed to him. They changed places again. She stood in awe of him. What he wished for was. He spoke of a way of living more in keeping with their circumstances. She moved them to a larger house and organized their lives according to such dim suggestions as she could get from him, one of which was that she should “stay out of the kitchen.” There had to be servants. Evenings were so much worse on that account that they began to go out more, often alone, sometimes together. By a law of contradiction, the more they concealed themselves from each other in the tatters of their pride and the further they went apart, the more polite they became and the easier it was to be friendly.

Her outwardness had changed no less. A wilful, pouting mouth had found the shape of wistfulness. Her eyes had lost their defiant glitter; they were softer, deeper and full of recognition. Into her movements had come that kind of gentle dignity, loftier than pride, lovelier than loveliness, which is idolized of men above the form and sign of beauty.

“Almost there,” she said, settling back in her seat.

“How strange the mill looks!—cold,” said Thane.

Agnes did not look.

“Five years,” said John. “What a long time!”

“Six,” said Agnes.

“Six,” said Thane.

The Gib carriage was waiting at the station. “I’ll be at the inn,” said John. “It will take no time to bring me if I’m wanted. If Enoch—if you don’t stay at the mansion I’d like you to have supper with me.”

“I’ll send you word,” said Thane.

O
N the last terrace the carriage was stopped by two men who detached themselves from a sullen group on the lawn and stood in the driveway with their hands upraised. Thane recognized them. The two who halted the carriage were puddlers with whom he had worked side by side in the mill. The others, to the number of six, were heaters and rollers, all men of long service under the tyrant.

“Want a word with you, Thane,” said the taller one of the two puddlers.