The Cinder Buggy (4 page)

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 indefatigibly 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 ironstone 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.

H
AVING 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 tilt-hammer 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?