Modern men and women who live in industrial cities are like mice that
have come out of the fields to live in houses that do not belong to
them. They live within the dark walls of the houses where only a dim
light penetrates, and so many have come that they grow thin and haggard
with the constant toil of getting food and warmth. Behind the walls
the mice scamper about in droves, and there is much squealing and
chattering. Now and then a bold mouse stands upon his hind legs and
addresses the others. He declares he will force his way through the
walls and conquer the gods who have built the house. “I will kill them,”
he declares. “The mice shall rule. You shall live in the light and the
warmth. There shall be food for all and no one shall go hungry.”
The little mice, gathered in the darkness out of sight in the great
houses, squeal with delight. After a time when nothing happens they
become sad and depressed. Their minds go back to the time when they
lived in the fields, but they do not go out of the walls of the houses,
because long living in droves has made them afraid of the silence of
long nights and the emptiness of skies. In the houses giant children are
being reared. When the children fight and scream in the houses and in
the streets, the dark spaces between the walls rumble with strange and
appalling noises.
The mice are terribly afraid. Now and then a single mouse for a moment
escapes the general fear. A mood comes over such a one and a light
comes into his eyes. When the noises run through the houses he makes up
stories about them. “The horses of the sun are hauling wagon loads of
days over the tops of trees,” he says and looks quickly about to see if
he has been heard. When he discovers a female mouse looking at him he
runs away with a flip of his tail and the female follows. While other
mice are repeating his saying and getting some little comfort from it,
he and the female mouse find a warm dark corner and lie close together.
It is because of them that mice continue to be born to dwell within the
walls of the houses.
When the first small model of Hugh McVey's plant-setting machine had
been whittled out by the half-wit Allie Mulberry, it replaced the famous
ship, floating in the bottle, that for two or three years had been lying
in the window of Hunter's jewelry store. Allie was inordinately proud of
the new specimen of his handiwork. As he worked under Hugh's directions
at a bench in a corner of the deserted pickle factory, he was like a
strange dog that has at last found a master. He paid no attention
to Steve Hunter who, with the air of one bearing in his breast some
gigantic secret, came in and went out at the door twenty times a day,
but kept his eyes on the silent Hugh who sat at a desk and made drawings
on sheets of paper. Allie tried valiantly to follow the instructions
given him and to understand what his master was trying to do, and Hugh,
finding himself unembarrassed by the presence of the half-wit, sometimes
spent hours trying to explain the workings of some intricate part of
the proposed machine. Hugh made each part crudely out of great pieces of
board and Allie reproduced the part in miniature. Intelligence began to
come into the eyes of the man who all his life had whittled meaningless
wooden chains, baskets formed out of peach stones, and ships intended
to float in bottles. Love and understanding began a little to do for him
what words could not have done. One day when a part Hugh had fashioned
would not work the half-wit himself made the model of a part that worked
perfectly. When Hugh incorporated it in the machine, he was so happy
that he could not sit still, and walked up and down cooing with delight.
When the model of the machine appeared in the jeweler's window, a fever
of excitement took hold of the minds of the people. Every one declared
himself either for or against it. Something like a revolution took
place. Parties were formed. Men who had no interest in the success of
the invention, and in the nature of things could not have, were ready
to fight any one who dared to doubt its success. Among the farmers who
drove into town to see the new wonder were many who said the machine
would not, could not, work. “It isn't practical,” they said. Going off
by themselves and forming groups, they whispered warnings. A hundred
objections sprang to their lips. “See all the little wheels and cogs the
thing has,” they said. “You see it won't work. You take now in a field
where there are stones and old tree roots, maybe, sticking in the
ground. There you'll see. Fools'll buy the machine, yes. They'll spend
their money. They'll put in plants. The plants'll die. The money'll be
wasted. There'll be no crop.” Old men, who had been cabbage farmers in
the country north of Bidwell all their lives, and whose bodies were all
twisted out of shape by the terrible labor of the cabbage fields,
came hobbling into town to look at the model of the new machine. Their
opinions were anxiously sought by the merchant, the carpenter, the
artisan, the doctor--by all the townspeople. Almost without exception,
they shook their heads in doubt. Standing on the sidewalk before the
jeweler's window, they stared at the machine and then, turning to the
crowd that had gathered about, they shook their heads in doubt. “Huh,”
they exclaimed, “a thing of wheels and cogs, eh? Well, so young Hunter
expects that thing to take the place of a man. He's a fool. I always
said that boy was a fool.” The merchants and townspeople, their ardor
a little dampened by the adverse decision of the men who knew
plant-setting, went off by themselves. They went into Birdie Spinks'
drugstore, but did not listen to the talk of Judge Hanby. “If the
machine works, the town'll wake up,” some one declared. “It means
factories, new people coming in, houses to be built, goods to be
bought.” Visions of suddenly acquired wealth began to float in their
minds. Young Ed Hall, apprentice to Ben Peeler the carpenter, grew
angry. “Hell,” he exclaimed, “why listen to a lot of damned old calamity
howlers? It's the town's duty to get out and plug for that machine. We
got to wake up here. We got to forget what we used to think about Steve
Hunter. Anyway, he saw a chance, didn't he? and he took it. I wish I was
him. I only wish I was him. And what about that fellow we thought was
maybe just a telegraph operator? He fooled us all slick, now didn't he?
I tell you we ought to be proud to have such men as him and Steve Hunter
living in Bidwell. That's what I say. I tell you it's the town's duty
to get out and plug for them and for that machine. If we don't, I know
what'll happen. Steve Hunter's a live one. I been thinking maybe he was.
He'll take that invention and that inventor of his to some other town or
to a city. That's what he'll do. Damn it, I tell you we got to get out
and back them fellows up. That's what I say.”
On the whole the town of Bidwell agreed with young Hall. The excitement
did not die, but grew every day more intense. Steve Hunter had a
carpenter come to his father's store and build in the show window facing
Main Street, a long shallow box formed in the shape of a field. This he
filled with pulverized earth and then by an arrangement of strings and
pulleys connected with a clockwork device the machine was pulled across
the field. In a receptacle at the top of the machine had been placed
some dozens of tiny plants no larger than pins. When the clockwork
was started and the strings pulled to imitate applied horse power, the
machine crept slowly forward, an arm came down and made a hole in the
ground, the plant dropped into the hole and spoon-like hands appeared
and packed the earth about the plant roots. At the top of the machine
there was a tank filled with water, and when the plant was set, a
portion of water, nicely calculated as to quantity, ran down a pipe and
was deposited at the plant roots.
Evening after evening the machine crawled forward across the tiny field,
setting the plants in perfect order. Steve Hunter busied himself with
it; he did nothing else; and rumors of a great company to be formed in
Bidwell to manufacture the device were whispered about. Every evening
a new tale was told. Steve went to Cleveland for a day and it was said
that Bidwell was to lose its chance, that big moneyed men had induced
Steve to take his factory project to the city. Hearing Ed Hall berate
a farmer who doubted the practicability of the machine, Steve took him
aside and talked to him. “We're going to need live young men who know
how to handle other men for jobs as superintendent and things like
that,” he said. “I make no promises. I only want to tell you that I like
live young fellows who can see the hole in a bushel basket. I like that
kind. I like to see them get up in the world.”
Steve heard the farmers continually expressing their skepticism about
making the plants that had been set by the machine grow into maturity,
and had the carpenter build another tiny field in a side window of the
store. He had the machine moved and plants set in the new field. He
let these grow. When some of the plants showed signs of dying he came
secretly at night and replaced them with sturdier shoots so that the
miniature field showed always a brave, vigorous front to the world.
Bidwell became convinced that the most rigorous of all forms of human
labor practiced by its people was at an end. Steve made and had hung in
the store window a large sheet showing the relative cost of planting an
acre of cabbage with the machine, and by what was already called “the
old way,” by hand. Then he formally announced that a stock company would
be formed in Bidwell and that every one would have a chance to get into
it. He printed an article in the weekly paper in which he said that many
offers had come to him to take his project to the city or to other and
larger towns. “Mr. McVey, the celebrated inventor, and I both want to
stick to our own people,” he said, regardless of the fact that Hugh knew
nothing of the article and had never been taken into the lives of the
people addressed. A day was set for the beginning of the taking of stock
subscriptions, and in private conversations Steve whispered of huge
profits to be made. The matter was talked over in every household and
plans were made for raising money to buy stock. John Clark agreed to
lend a certain percentage on the value of the town property and Steve
secured a long-time option on all the land facing Turner's Pike clear
down to Pickleville. When the town heard of this it was filled with
wonder. “Gee,” the loiterers before the store exclaimed, “old Bidwell
is going to grow up. Now look at that, will you? There are going to be
houses clear down to Pickleville.” Hugh went to Cleveland to see about
having one of his new machines made in steel and wood and in a size that
would permit its actual use in the field. He returned, a hero in the
town's eyes. His silence made it possible for the people, who could not
entirely forget their former lack of faith in Steve, to let their minds
take hold of something they thought was truly heroic.
In the evening, after going again to see the machine in the window
of the jewelry store, crowds of young and old men wandered down along
Turner's Pike to the Wheeling Station where a new man had come to
replace Hugh. They hardly saw the evening train when it came in. Like
devotees before a shrine they gazed with something like worship in their
eyes at the old pickle factory, and when by chance Hugh came among them,
unconscious of the sensation he was creating, they became embarrassed
as he was always embarrassed by their presence. Every one dreamed of
becoming suddenly rich by the power of the man's mind. They thought of
him as thinking always great thoughts. To be sure, Steve Hunter might be
more than half bluff and blow and pretense, but there was no bluff and
blow about Hugh. He didn't waste his time in words. He thought, and out
of his thought sprang almost unbelievable wonders.
In every part of the town of Bidwell, the new impulse toward progress
was felt. Old men, who had become settled in their ways and who had
begun to pass their days in a sort of sleepy submission to the idea of
the gradual passing away of their lives, awoke and went into Main Street
in the evening to argue with skeptical farmers. Beside Ed Hall, who had
become a Demosthenes on the subject of progress and the duty of the town
to awake and stick to Steve Hunter and the machine, a dozen other men
held forth on the street corners. Oratorical ability awoke in the most
unexpected places. Rumors flew from lip to lip. It was said that within
a year Bidwell was to have a brick factory covering acres of ground,
that there would be paved streets and electric lights.
Oddly enough the most persistent decrier of the new spirit in Bidwell
was the man who, if the machine turned out to be a success, would profit
most from its use. Ezra French, the profane, refused to be convinced.
When pressed by Ed Hall, Dr. Robinson, and other enthusiasts, he fell
back upon the word of that God whose name had been so much upon his
lips. The decrier of God became the defender of God. “The thing, you
see, can't be done. It ain't all right. Something awful'll happen. The
rains won't come and the plants'll dry up and die. It'll be like it
was in Egypt in the Bible times,” he declared. The old farmer with the
twisted leg stood before the crowd in the drug-store and proclaimed the
truth of God's word. “Don't it say in the Bible men shall work and labor
by the sweat of their brows?” he asked sharply. “Can a machine like that
sweat? You know it can't. And it can't do the work either. No, siree.
Men've got to do it. That's the way things have been since Cain killed
Abel in the Garden of Eden. God intended it so and there can't no
telegraph operator or no smart young squirt like Steve Hunter--fellows
in a town like this--set themselves up before me to change the workings
of God's laws. It can't be done, and if it could be done it would be
wicked and ungodly to try. I'll have nothing to do with it. It ain't
right. That's what I say and all your smart talk ain't a-going to change
me.”
It was in the year 1892 that Steve Hunter organized the first industrial
enterprise that came to Bidwell. It was called the Bidwell Plant-Setting
Machine Company, and in the end it turned out to be a failure. A large
factory was built on the river bank facing the New York Central tracks.
It is now occupied by an enterprise called the Hunter Bicycle Company
and is what in industrial parlance is called a live, going concern.
For two years Hugh worked faithfully trying to perfect the first of his
inventions. After the working models of the plant-setter were brought
from Cleveland, two trained mechanics were employed to come to Bidwell
and work with him. In the old pickle factory an engine was installed
and lathes and other tool-making machines were set up. For a long time
Steve, John Clark, Tom Butterworth, and the other enthusiastic promoters
of the enterprise had no doubt as to the final outcome. Hugh wanted to
perfect the machine, had his heart set on doing the job he had set out
to do, but he had then and, for that matter, he continued during his
whole life to have but little conception of the import in the lives of
the people about him of the things he did. Day after day, with two
city mechanics and Allie Mulberry to drive the team of horses Steve had
provided, he went into a rented field north of the factory. Weak places
developed in the complicated mechanism, and new and stronger parts
were made. For a time the machine worked perfectly. Then other defects
appeared and other parts had to be strengthened and changed. The machine
became too heavy to be handled by one team. It would not work when the
soil was either too wet or too dry. It worked perfectly in both wet and
dry sand but would do nothing in clay. During the second year and
when the factory was nearing completion and much machinery had been
installed, Hugh went to Steve and told him of what he thought were the
limitations of the machine. He was depressed by his failure, but in
working with the machine, he felt he had succeeded in educating himself
as he never could have done by studying books. Steve decided that the
factory should be started and some of the machines made and sold. “You
keep the two men you have and don't talk,” he said. “The machine may yet
turn out to be better than you think. One can never tell. I have made it
worth their while to keep still.” On the afternoon of the day on which
he had his talk with Hugh, Steve called the four men who were associated
with him in the promotion of the enterprise into the back room of the
bank and told them of the situation. “We're up against something
here,” he said. “If we let word of the failure of this machine get out,
where'll we be? It is a case of the survival of the fittest.”
Steve explained his plan to the men in the room. After all, he said,
there was no occasion for any of them to get excited. He had taken them
into the thing and he proposed to get them out. “I'm that kind of a
man,” he said pompously. In a way, he declared, he was glad things had
turned out as they had. The four men had little actual money invested.
They had all tried honestly to do something for the town and he would
see to it that everything came out all right. “We'll be honest with
every one,” he said. “The stock in the company has all been sold. We'll
make some of the machines and sell them. If they're failures, as this
inventor thinks, it will not be our fault. The plant, you see, will
have to be sold cheap. When that times comes we five will have to save
ourselves and the future of the town. The machinery we have bought, is,
you see, iron and wood working machinery, the very latest kind. It can
be used to make some other thing. If the plant-setting machine is a
failure we'll simply buy up the plant at a low price and make something
else. Perhaps it'll be better for the town to have the entire stock
control in our hands. You see we few men have got to run things here.
It's going to be on our shoulders to see that labor is employed. A lot
of small stock-holders are a nuisance. As man to man I'm going to ask
each of you not to sell his stock, but if any one comes to you and asks
about its value, I expect you to be loyal to our enterprise. I'll begin
looking about for something to replace the plant-setting machine, and
when the shop closes we'll start right up again. It isn't every day men
get a chance to sell themselves a fine plant full of new machinery as we
can do in a year or so now.”
Steve went out of the bank and left the four men staring at each other.
Then his father got up and went out. The other men, all connected with
the bank, arose and wandered out. “Well,” said John Clark, somewhat
heavily, “he's a smart man. I suppose after all it is up to us to stick
with him and with the town. As he says, labor has got to be employed. I
can't see that it does a carpenter or a farmer any good to own a little
stock in a factory. It only takes their minds off their work. They have
foolish dreams of getting rich and don't attend to their own affairs. It
would be an actual benefit to the town if a few men owned the factory.”
The banker lighted a cigar and going to a window stared out into the
main street of Bidwell. Already the town had changed. Three new brick
buildings were being erected on Main Street within sight of the bank
window. Workmen employed in the building of the factory had come to town
to live, and many new houses were being built. Everywhere things were
astir. The stock of the company had been oversubscribed, and almost
every day men came into the bank and spoke of wanting to buy more.
Only the day before a farmer had come in with two thousand dollars. The
banker's mind began to secrete the poison of his age. “After all, it's
men like Steve Hunter, Tom Butterworth, Gordon Hart, and myself that
have to take care of things, and to be in shape to do it we have to look
out for ourselves,” he soliloquized. Again he stared into Main Street.
Tom Butterworth went out at the front door. He wanted to be by himself
and think his own thoughts. Gordon Hart returned to the empty back room
and standing by a window looked out into an alleyway. His thoughts ran
in the same channel as those that played through the mind of the bank
president. He also thought of men who wanted to buy stock in the company
that was doomed to failure. He began to doubt the judgment of Hugh McVey
in the matter of failure. “Such fellows are always pessimists,” he told
himself. From the window at the back of the bank, he could see over the
roofs of a row of small sheds and down a residence street to where two
new workingmen's houses were being built. His thoughts only differed
from the thoughts of John Clark because he was a younger man. “A few men
of the younger generation, like Steve and myself will have to take hold
of things,” he muttered aloud. “We'll have to have money to work with.
We'll have to take the responsibility of the ownership of money.”
At the front of the bank John Clark puffed at his cigar. He felt like a
soldier weighing the chances of battle. Vaguely he thought of himself as
a general, a kind of U. S. Grant of industry. The lives and happiness
of many people, he told himself, depended on the clear working of his
brain. “Well,” he thought, “when factories start coming to a town and
it begins to grow as this town is growing no man can stop it. The
fellow who thinks of individual men, little fellows with their savings
invested, who may be hurt by an industrial failure, is just a weakling.
Men have to face the duties life brings. The few men who see clearly
have to think first of themselves. They have to save themselves in order
that they may save others.”
* * * * *
Things kept on the stir in Bidwell and the gods of chance played into
the hands of Steve Hunter. Hugh invented an apparatus for lifting a
loaded coal-car off the railroad tracks, carrying it high up into the
air and dumping its contents into a chute. By its use an entire car of
coal could be emptied with a roaring rush into the hold of a ship or the
engine room of a factory. A model of the new invention was made and
a patent secured. Then Steve Hunter carried it off to New York. He
received two hundred thousand dollars in cash for it, half of which went
to Hugh. Steve's faith in the inventive genius of the Missourian was
renewed and strengthened. He looked forward with a feeling almost
approaching pleasure to the time when the town would be forced to face
the fact that the plant-setting machine was a failure, and the factory
with its new machinery would have to be thrown on the market. He knew
that his associates in the promotion of the enterprise were secretly
selling their stock. One day he went to Cleveland and had a long talk
with a banker there. Hugh was at work on a corn-cutting machine and
already he had secured an option on it. “Perhaps when the time comes to
sell the factory there'll be more than one bidder,” he told Ernestine,
the soap maker's daughter, who had married him within a month after the
sale of the car-unloading device. He grew indignant when he told her
of the disloyalty of the two men in the bank, and the rich farmer,
Tom Butterworth. “They're selling their shares and letting the small
stock-holders lose their money,” he declared. “I told 'em not to do
it. Now if anything happens to spoil their plans they'll not have me to
blame.”
Nearly a year had been spent in stirring up the people of Bidwell to the
point of becoming investors. Then things began to stir. The ground was
broken for the erection of the factory. No one knew of the difficulties
that had been encountered in attempting to perfect the machine and word
was passed about that in actual tests in the fields it had proven
itself entirely practical. The skeptical farmers who came into town on
Saturdays were laughed at by the town enthusiasts. A field, that had
been planted during one of the brief periods when the machine finding
ideal soil conditions had worked perfectly, was left to grow. As when he
operated the tiny model in the store window, Steve took no chances. He
engaged Ed Hall to go at night and replace the plants that did not live.
“It's fair enough,” he explained to Ed. “A hundred things can cause the
plants to die, but if they die it'll be blamed on the machine. What
will become of the town if we don't believe in the thing we're going to
manufacture here?”
The crowds of people, who in the evenings walked out along Turner's Pike
to look at the field with its long rows of sturdy young cabbages, moved
restlessly about and talked of the new days. From the field they went
along the railroad tracks to the site of the factory. The brick walls
began to mount up into the sky. Machinery began to arrive and was housed
under temporary sheds against the time when it could be installed. An
advance horde of workmen came to town and new faces appeared on Main
Street in the evening. The thing that was happening in Bidwell happened
in towns all over the Middle West. Out through the coal and iron regions
of Pennsylvania, into Ohio and Indiana, and on westward into the States
bordering on the Mississippi River, industry crept. Gas and oil were
discovered in Ohio and Indiana. Over night, towns grew into cities. A
madness took hold of the minds of the people. Villages like Lima and
Findlay, Ohio, and like Muncie and Anderson in Indiana, became small
cities within a few weeks. To some of these places, so anxious were the
people to get to them and to invest their money, excursion trains were
run. Town lots that a few weeks before the discovery of oil or gas could
have been bought for a few dollars sold for thousands. Wealth seemed to
be spurting out of the very earth. On farms in Indiana and Ohio giant
gas wells blew the drilling machinery out of the ground, and the fuel so
essential to modern industrial development rushed into the open. A wit,
standing in the presence of one of the roaring gas wells exclaimed,
“Papa, Earth has indigestion; he has gas on his stomach. His face will
be covered with pimples.”
Having, before the factories came, no market for the gas, the wells were
lighted and at night great torches of flame lit the skies. Pipes were
laid on the surface of the ground and by a day's work a laborer earned
enough to heat his house at tropical heat through an entire winter.
Farmers owning oil-producing land went to bed in the evening poor and
owing money at the bank, and awoke in the morning rich. They moved
into the towns and invested their money in the factories that sprang
up everywhere. In one county in southern Michigan, over five hundred
patents for woven wire farm fencing were taken out in one year,
and almost every patent was a magnet about which a company for the
manufacture of fence formed itself. A vast energy seemed to come out
of the breast of earth and infect the people. Thousands of the most
energetic men of the middle States wore themselves out in forming
companies, and when the companies failed, immediately formed others.
In the fast-growing towns, men who were engaged in organizing companies
representing a capital of millions lived in houses thrown hurriedly
together by carpenters who, before the time of the great awakening, were
engaged in building barns. It was a time of hideous architecture, a time
when thought and learning paused. Without music, without poetry, without
beauty in their lives or impulses, a whole people, full of the native
energy and strength of lives lived in a new land, rushed pell-mell
into a new age. A man in Ohio, who had been a dealer in horses, made a
million dollars out of a patent churn he had bought for the price of a
farm horse, took his wife to visit Europe and in Paris bought a painting
for fifty thousand dollars. In another State of the Middle West, a man
who sold patent medicine from door to door through the country began
dealing in oil leases, became fabulously rich, bought himself three
daily newspapers, and before he had reached the age of thirty-five
succeeded in having himself elected Governor of his State. In the
glorification of his energy his unfitness as a statesman was forgotten.
In the days before the coming of industry, before the time of the mad
awakening, the towns of the Middle West were sleepy places devoted to
the practice of the old trades, to agriculture and to merchandising. In
the morning the men of the towns went forth to work in the fields or
to the practice of the trade of carpentry, horse-shoeing, wagon making,
harness repairing, and the making of shoes and clothing. They read
books and believed in a God born in the brains of men who came out of a
civilization much like their own. On the farms and in the houses in the
towns the men and women worked together toward the same ends in life.
They lived in small frame houses set on the plains like boxes, but
very substantially built. The carpenter who built a farmer's house
differentiated it from the barn by putting what he called scroll work up
under the eaves and by building at the front a porch with carved posts.
After one of the poor little houses had been lived in for a long time,
after children had been born and men had died, after men and women had
suffered and had moments of joy together in the tiny rooms under the low
roofs, a subtle change took place. The houses became almost beautiful
in their old humanness. Each of the houses began vaguely to shadow forth
the personality of the people who lived within its walls.
In the farmhouses and in the houses on the side streets in the villages,
life awoke at dawn. Back of each of the houses there was a barn for the
horses and cows, and sheds for pigs and chickens. At daylight a chorus
of neighs, squeals, and cries broke the silence. Boys and men came
out of the houses. They stood in the open spaces before the barns and
stretched their bodies like sleepy animals. The arms extended upward
seemed to be supplicating the gods for fair days, and the fair days
came. The men and boys went to a pump beside the house and washed their
faces and hands in the cold water. In the kitchens there was the smell
and sound of the cooking of food. The women also were astir. The men
went into the barns to feed the animals and then hurried to the houses
to be themselves fed. A continual grunting sound came from the sheds
where pigs were eating corn, and over the houses a contented silence
brooded.
After the morning meal men and animals went together to the fields and
to the doing of their tasks, and in the houses the women mended clothes,
put fruit in cans against the coming of winter and talked of woman's
affairs. On the streets of the towns on fair days lawyers, doctors, the
officials of the county courts, and the merchants walked about in their
shirt sleeves. The house painter went along with his ladder on his
shoulder. In the stillness there could be heard the hammers of the
carpenters building a new house for the son of a merchant who had
married the daughter of a blacksmith. A sense of quiet growth awoke in
sleeping minds. It was the time for art and beauty to awake in the land.
Instead, the giant, Industry, awoke. Boys, who in the schools had read
of Lincoln, walking for miles through the forest to borrow his first
book, and of Garfield, the towpath lad who became president, began to
read in the newspapers and magazines of men who by developing
their faculty for getting and keeping money had become suddenly and
overwhelmingly rich. Hired writers called these men great, and there was
no maturity of mind in the people with which to combat the force of the
statement, often repeated. Like children the people believed what they
were told.
While the new factory was being built with the carefully saved dollars
of the people, young men from Bidwell went out to work in other places.
After oil and gas were discovered in neighboring states, they went to
the fast-growing towns and came home telling wonder tales. In the boom
towns men earned four, five and even six dollars a day. In secret and
when none of the older people were about, they told of adventures on
which they had gone in the new places; of how, attracted by the flood
of money, women came from the cities; and the times they had been with
these women. Young Harley Parsons, whose father was a shoemaker and who
had learned the blacksmith trade, went to work in one of the new oil
fields. He came home wearing a fancy silk vest and astonished his
fellows by buying and smoking ten-cent cigars. His pockets were bulging
with money. “I'm not going to stay long in this town, you can bet on
that,” he declared one evening as he stood, surrounded by a group of
admirers before Fanny Twist's Millinery Shop on lower Main Street. “I
have been with a Chinese woman, and an Italian, and with one from South
America.” He took a puff of his cigar and spat on the sidewalk. “I'm
out to get what I can out of life,” he declared. “I'm going back and
I'm going to make a record. Before I get through I'm going to be with a
woman of every nationality on earth, that's what I'm going to do.”
Joseph Wainsworth the harness maker, who had been the first man in
Bidwell to feel the touch of the heavy finger of industrialism, could
not get over the effect of the conversation had with Butterworth, the
farmer who had asked him to repair harnesses made by machines in a
factory. He became a silent disgruntled man and muttered as he went
about his work in the shop. When Will Sellinger his apprentice threw
up his place and went to Cleveland he did not get another boy but for
a time worked alone in the shop. He got the name of being disagreeable,
and on winter afternoons the farmers no longer came into his place to
loaf. Being a sensitive man, Joe felt like a pigmy, a tiny thing walking
always in the presence of a giant that might at any moment and by a
whim destroy him. All his life he had been somewhat off-hand with his
customers. “If they don't like my work, let 'em go to the devil,” he
said to his apprentices. “I know my trade and I don't have to bow down
to any one here.”
When Steve Hunter organized the Bidwell Plant-Setting Machine Company,
the harness maker put his savings, twelve hundred dollars, into the
stock of the company. One day, during the time when the factory was
building, he heard that Steve had paid twelve hundred dollars for a new
lathe that had just arrived by freight and had been set on the floor of
the uncompleted building. The promoter had told a farmer that the lathe
would do the work of a hundred men, and the farmer had come into Joe's
shop and repeated the statement. It stuck in Joe's mind and he came to
believe that the twelve hundred dollars he had invested in stock had
been used for the purchase of the lathe. It was money he had earned in
a long lifetime of effort and it had now bought a machine that would do
the work of a hundred men. Already his money had increased by a hundred
fold and he wondered why he could not be happy about the matter. On some
days he was happy, and then his happiness was followed by an odd fit of
depression. Suppose, after all, the plant-setting machine wouldn't work?
What then could be done with the lathe, with the machine bought with his
money?
One evening after dark and without saying anything to his wife, he went
down along Turner's Pike to the old factory at Pickleville where Hugh
with the half-wit Allie Mulberry, and the two mechanics from the city,
were striving to correct the faults in the plant-setting machine. Joe
wanted to look at the tall gaunt man from the West, and had some notion
of trying to get into conversation with him and of asking his opinion of
the possibilities of the success of the new machine. The man of the
age of flesh and blood wanted to walk in the presence of the man who
belonged to the new age of iron and steel. When he got to the factory
it was dark and on an express truck in front of the Wheeling Station the
two city workmen sat smoking their evening pipes. Joe walked past them
to the station door and then returned along the platform and got again
into Turner's Pike. He stumbled along the path beside the road and
presently saw Hugh McVey coming toward him. It was one of the evenings
when Hugh, overcome with loneliness, and puzzled that his new position
in the town's life did not bring him any closer to people, had gone
to town to walk through Main Street, half hoping some one would break
through his embarrassment and enter into conversation with him.
When the harness maker saw Hugh walking in the path, he crept into a
fence corner, and crouching down, watched the man as Hugh had watched
the French boys at work in the cabbage fields. Strange thoughts came
into his head. He thought the extraordinarily tall figure before him in
some way terrible. He became childishly angry and for a moment thought
that if he had a stone in his hand he would throw it at the man, the
workings of whose brain had so upset his own life. Then as the figure of
Hugh went away along the path another mood came. “I have worked all my
life for twelve hundred dollars, for money that will buy one machine
that this man thinks nothing about,” he muttered aloud. “Perhaps I'll
get more money than I invested: Steve Hunter says maybe I will. If
machines kill the harness-making trade what's the difference? I'll be
all right. The thing to do is to get in with the new times, to wake
up, that's the ticket. With me it's like with every one else: nothing
venture nothing gain.”
Joe crawled out of the fence corner and went stealthily along the road
behind Hugh. A fervor seized him and he thought he would like to creep
close and touch with his finger the hem of Hugh's coat. Afraid to try
anything so bold his mind took a new turn. He ran in the darkness along
the road toward town and, when he had crossed the bridge and come to the
New York Central tracks, turned west and went along the tracks until he
came to the new factory. In the darkness the half completed walls stuck
up into the sky, and all about were piles of building materials. The
night had been dark and cloudy, but now the moon began to push its way
through the clouds. Joe crawled over a pile of bricks and through a
window into the building. He felt his way along the walls until he came
to a mass of iron covered by a rubber blanket. He was sure it must be
the lathe his money had bought, the machine that was to do the work of a
hundred men and that was to make him comfortably rich in his old age.
No one had spoken of any other machine having been brought in on the
factory floor. Joe knelt on the floor and put his hands about the heavy
iron legs of the machine. “What a strong thing it is! It will not break
easily,” he thought. He had an impulse to do something he knew would be
foolish, to kiss the iron legs of the machine or to say a prayer as
he knelt before it. Instead he got to his feet and crawling out again
through the window, went home. He felt renewed and full of new courage
because of the experiences of the night, but when he got to his own
house and stood at the door outside, he heard his neighbor, David
Chapman, a wheelwright who worked in Charlie Collins' wagon shop,
praying in his bedroom before an open window. Joe listened for a moment
and, for some reason he couldn't understand, his new-found faith was
destroyed by what he heard. David Chapman, a devout Methodist, was
praying for Hugh McVey and for the success of his invention. Joe knew
his neighbor had also invested his savings in the stock of the new
company. He had thought that he alone was doubtful of success, but it
was apparent that doubt had come also into the mind of the wheelwright.
The pleading voice of the praying man, as it broke the stillness of the
night, cut across and for the moment utterly destroyed his confidence.
“O God, help the man Hugh McVey to remove every obstacle that stands
in his way,” David Chapman prayed. “Make the plant-setting machine a
success. Bring light into the dark places. O Lord, help Hugh McVey, thy
servant, to build successfully the plant-setting machine.”
BOOK THREE