VI

Having heard of New Damascus that it was marked to become the seat

of the American iron industry, there appeared at this time one Bruno

Mitchell, a capitalist, thinking to open a bank if the repute of

the place should prove to be well founded. He had prospered in New

England, where the practice of banking was already well advanced; but

he believed in the star of iron and it led him hither. In his active

character he was hard and avaricious, yet there was a quaintness about

him that first contradicted that fact and then mitigated one’s opinion

of it. He had never filled his skin, or perhaps it was a size too large

in the taking. Instead of hanging loosely, as an over-size skin does on

wavering natures, it had shrunk to measure, so that he was prematurely

wrinkled and had a leathery look. His face wore a quizzical expression.

His eyes were blue and restless. He walked softly.

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

Persuaded by omens and discoveries that New Damascus was the place,

Mitchell moved himself there, together with all his means and chattels

and a daughter named Esther. He was an important addition to the

community. He gave it the prestige of having one of the first banks

west of Philadelphia. To Gib and Breakspeare he was very helpful. Not

only did he discount their bills and effect payments on their account

at distant points in a manner then new and miraculous; he also advanced

them considerable sums of credit and capital. He was anxious to make

a permanent investment in the business, and Enoch was willing that he

should. Aaron objected, as he had a right to do, and although both

Enoch and Mitchell were disappointed, there was no open feeling about

it.

Esther Mitchell was twenty-four. Since the death of her mother five

years before she had lived alone with her father, who took it each day

for granted that she should be content to manage his household until

whatever it is that happens to women happened to her. They never spoke

of it and nothing happened. So time wore on. Once in a while he said to

himself, “I wonder why Esther never has a beau,” and then put it out of

his mind. They behaved toward each other like two married people who

run in parallel grooves and never touch.

When at the death of his wife the daughter returned to him from a

convent school he hardly knew her. She was still, after five years,

as much a stranger to him as on the day she voluntarily assumed the

responsibilities of her mother. He never had been able to penetrate

her reserve. When he tried, as he did at first, he had a sense of

trespassing and guiltily retired. She had a way of looking at things,

at people, at him, with steady, wide-open eyes that never betrayed what

she was thinking. Sometimes a troubled expression would appear in

them, like the shadow of a cloud on the surface of a still blue pool.

They talked very little. What there was of it was friendly. He had no

idea what she did with her own time, if she had any, and never asked.

As a housekeeper she was faultless. As the female adjunct of an

elderly, selfish engrossed man she had all the merits and none of the

liabilities of a perfect wife; besides she was in youth and sweet to

the eye. As a fellow human being she was a riddle. In that light he

knew hardly more than her name. Her castle was invisible. There was no

straight way to it. The outermost signs were all misleading.

The partners were frequent visitors in the Mitchell household. The

atmosphere was social. The subject was business. They seldom talked of

anything else. Business of course has many facets. It was not merely

the affairs of Gib and Breakspeare they discussed. They debated the

future of iron, metallurgical processes, the blundering stupidity of

Congress.

The feud between politics and business was never new. An economic

truth more obvious than daylight to the industrial founders was even

then a tangle of obscurities to Congress. What statesmen could not see

clearly, once for all, was that without high tariff protection the

American iron industry would live at the mercy of foreign competitors.

On that text Enoch said always the last word, which was his own, and

became a famous slogan among the ironmongers of that generation. It was

this:

“War or tariff.”

That now sounds cryptic. Then it was clear enough. Everybody knew or

could remember that there was no iron working in this land before the

war of Independence. The mother country forbade it. What she wanted

from the American colonists was the raw material to be worked up in

her own iron mills with her own skilled labor, for if the colonists

produced iron manufactures for themselves English exports to the New

World would suffer. An act of the British Crown decreed that “no mill

or other engine for slitting or rolling of iron, no plating forge to

work with a tilthammer and no furnace for making steel” should be

erected “in any of His Majesty’s Colonies in America.” Mills already

existing were declared a public nuisance and abated as such.

So the colonists, forbidden to work their own iron, were obliged to

sell their raw materials to England and buy it back from British

merchants in the form of manufactures. The war cut the colonies off

from these British manufactures. They were thereupon obliged by

necessity to found a native iron working industry. After the war

the British sent their products to the United States at prices with

which the new American industrialists could not successfully compete,

hence the demand that British iron be excluded, or at least that the

importation of it be penalized by high tariff. This was the historic

experience that caused the prosperity, in fact the life, of the early

American iron industry to be associated with war and tariff. They were

in results the same. War had all the effects of a high tariff. It kept

the foreign stuff out.

“And nobody wants war,” Enoch would add.

Another topic endlessly debated was the railroad. It had just come

within range of practical vision. What were its possibilities? Would

it supplement or supersede canals? Enoch could not imagine that the

railroad would ever take the place of canals. Aaron thought it would.

Mitchell thought with Aaron, and Enoch for that reason was more rigid

in his opinion.

Once Aaron broke all precedent in this private chamber of commerce by

saying suddenly to Esther:

“What do you think?”

He had been observing her for some time. Through all their interminable

repetitious dinner table talk she maintained an air of rapt attention,

with her gaze on the one who was speaking, and never uttered a word. He

wondered if she were listening or merely watching them. Both her father

and Enoch were surprised that anyone should address her with that kind

of question. She was not startled.

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

In the way she said it there was a kind of disbelieving that referred

neither to canals nor railroads but to something represented by the

discussion. The effect was strange. All three men were disturbed

in their sense of importance. They attacked her in concert, with

a condescending manner, Enoch leading. How like a woman to think

that way! What had happiness got to do with it? The question was

economic. Which would be the more efficient means of transportation?

But anyhow--this was Enoch--anyhow, was it not obvious that whatever

increased the wealth of the world increased also the sum of human

happiness?

“Is it?” said Esther.

They could get nothing more out of her. She declined to be argued with

and smiled at them from a great distance. Her smile was impassable.

Several times after that Aaron tried to involve her in their

conversations, at dinner, or in the drawing room where she sat apart

with her needlework, but never again with any success. She would look

at him with a bothered expression, and either recognize his effort by

no other sign or slowly shake her head. This he took for disapproval

and thereafter ignored her, as the others did, except now and then to

scrutinize her in a surreptitious manner. When she surprised him at

that she returned his gaze with distant, impersonal curiosity, until he

was the first to turn away.

A change took place gradually in the partners’ relations with the

Mitchell menage. Aaron’s visits were no less recurring, but Enoch’s

became more frequent and regular. It was the only household in New

Damascus in which he felt wholly at ease with himself and properly

esteemed. He seldom went anywhere else. Very soon the women people

were saying they knew what the attraction was. A certain expectation

began to crystallize. Enoch became aware of it, not knowing how.

Mitchell cultivated it adroitly. Since his offer to invest capital

in the business of Gib and Breakspeare had been declined the idea of

marrying Esther to one of the firm took possession of his thoughts. His

preference was for Enoch because more securely through him than through

Aaron would the Mitchell chariot be hitched to the star of iron. He

talked of both of them to Esther, with an air of being impartial, as

if giving her his intimate, unguarded impressions. As he understood

women, their minds worked on these matters in a contrary manner. To

disparage Aaron might be prejudicial to his ends. He never did that.

Nevertheless, Enoch came off by every comparison as much the superior

person. Esther listened attentively and said nothing.

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

wonder.”

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

“But you may,” he said.

“Have you some one in view for me?” In her voice was a certain elusive

tone, unresolved between doubt and irony, that he knew and hated. It

made him uneasy. Sometimes it made him feel small.

“Seriously, I have,” he replied. “That is to say, I have hoped you

might become interested that way in Enoch Gib. You know what I think of

him. He will be a great man in this country if nothing happens.”

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

again.

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” he said. “I am thinking of your future.

It would give me a sense of great comfort.”

This was at dinner’s end one evening when they were alone. As he

talked, with his eyes down, he traced a figure on the table cloth with

a spoon, making it deeper and deeper as his unease increased. He felt

all the time that she was regarding him with a wide, impenetrable

expression.

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

He started and looked at her furtively. She was regarding him freely.

There was in her expression the trace of an ambiguous, amused smile. He

blushed and rose from the table.

Expectations increased. More marriages take place under the tyranny of

expectation than Heaven imagines. New Damascus society became tensely

expectant.

Enoch proposed, as Esther expected, with an air of bestowing himself

where he was sure to be appreciated. She took some time about it and

then accepted him.

Aaron was apparently the only person in New Damascus who had not

foreseen it. He was deeply astonished. Why? It was not an improbable

consummation. Yet it seemed to him strange and unnatural.

He first heard of it at dinner with the Mitchells. Enoch was present.

Mitchell announced it as if Aaron were a large party of friends. He

responded as such. There was a false note in his felicitations. He was

aware of it; so was Esther. But in trying to cancel the impression

he made it worse. Enoch was protected as by wool with a sense of

proprietorship and self-satisfaction. Mitchell was insensitive.

Esther kept looking at Aaron. There was a troubled, startled expression

in her eyes. He misread it for distaste. He had long imagined she

disliked him. Several times that evening she was brief with him, almost

curt, and this had never happened before.

His visits to the Mitchell house thereafter were formal and less

frequent. Enoch’s manner of making himself paramount affected him

disagreeably. And Esther’s behaviour perplexed him. She was at one time

much more friendly than he expected and at another so deliberately

indifferent that he could only conclude that she meant to estrange him.

Yet now a fatality began to operate. By a law of coincidence that

we do not understand, and may not exist, they began to meet outside

the household, purely, as it seemed in each case, by accident,--in

unexpected places, on the street again and again, once at night in

a crowd at an open air Punch and Judy show in which neither of them

was at all interested, once in Philadelphia where he was transacting

business and she was shopping with her maid, and once in a memorable

way on a path through the woods to Throne Rock, a natural seat on the

mountain summit from which the view of the valley was exciting.

It was a Sunday afternoon in early May. He was going; she was

returning. They were at first surprised, then embarrassed, and became

absurdly self-conscious. She wore a wide-brim hat, pulled down on both

sides and tied under her chin. She was hot and tired; her color was

high. Her dress was torn. He noticed it.

“I was after these,” she said, catching his glance. She held out a

bunch of dogwood blossoms, with a gesture to share them. He admired

them and there was nothing else to say. So they stood, she looking at

him and holding out the dogwood flowers, he looking fixedly at them,

until her arm dropped and she turned to go on. He let her go and went

his way up the path. But he looked back. She had stopped and was seated

on a fallen tree trunk. He returned. She did not look up.

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

“A farewell party?”

“There ought to be a better name for it,” he said. “A sour grape party,

then. I’ve always wanted to give you a dinner at the mansion. Will you

come?”

“Yes,” she said.

And again there was nothing else to say. She rose and he walked with

her toward the town.

“If Enoch won’t mind,” he said.

“Why should he mind?” she asked.

“Perhaps he won’t,” said Aaron.

This thought, as to whether Enoch should mind, had far and separate

projections in each of their minds and kept them silent until at the

natural parting of their ways she turned to face him and held out her

hand. It was a gesture of dismissal. He bowed and left her.

The dinner party took place just two weeks before her wedding day.

It was perhaps too elaborate. It contained every preparable element

of success. Aaron did his best to save it, and yet nobody enjoyed it.

Esther was visibly depressed. Enoch sulked. The guests rallied them

until it was seen to be hopeless and then let them alone. They simply

could not react with gaiety.

Aaron as host had special rights in the guest of honor and took them.

Enoch grew steadily worse. Opinion upon him was divided. Some thought

it was the natural gloom of his nature and were full of foreboding for

Esther. Others said they did believe the man was jealous.

After a dance Esther and Aaron walked on the terrace.

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

“No,” he said. “It’s my fault. I knew better. Yet I couldn’t resist it.

And it is in a sense a farewell party.”

“What does that mean?”

“After your wedding I may not see you again for a long time. I’m only

waiting on Enoch’s account. Then I shall be going to Europe for a year,

perhaps more.”

“On business?”

“Y-e-s,” he answered slowly.

They took several more turns without speaking.

“What are your plans?” he asked.

“None that I know of,” she said.

She had stopped. He saw that her gaze was directed at Enoch’s

ancestral iron-stone house below. The fitful glare of the blast

furnaces, lower down, lighted its sombre nakedness and gave it a

relentless, sinister aspect. The windows, which were small and

unsoftened by copings, were like cruel, ferocious eyes in a powerful,

short-haired, suspicious animal.

“Shall you live there?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, giving him a frowning, startled look, as if he had

surprised her at a disadvantage. She added: “Enoch took me through it

yesterday. The room where he was born,--that will be mine. The room

where his father died is just as it was then. He thinks we shouldn’t

touch it.”

She shivered. He asked her if she was cold. She wasn’t, but on the next

turn past the door she turned and they went in.

Enoch’s idea of marriage was inherited. You take a wife from the church

to the ancestral abode and become jointly responsible with God for her

past, present, future and hereafter, for her body, her mind, her way

with the neighbors, for everything about her save the separate flame of

her individuality. That is vanity. The house is yours, therefore she

must accept it. It was yours before she had any rights in it, therefore

she must get used to it, as she must get used to you. And why not? If

Aaron married would he not take his wife to the Woolwine Mansion just

as it was? Well, what was Aaron’s was like Aaron and what was Enoch’s

was like Enoch, and what a woman married was what she got.

Enoch rode home with Esther that night in her father’s carriage.

Mitchell had gone home earlier and sent the carriage back. As they were

passing the iron-stone house--fatally then--Enoch asked:

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

“Nothing,” she said.

That was literally the truth. It was with extreme difficulty that they

found anything to say to each other. Never had they carried on an

intimate, self-revealing conversation. There was too much constraint

on both sides. But Enoch could hardly believe that Aaron was under

any circumstances inarticulate, like himself. Or was it that he knew

instinctively if what Esther said was true there lay in that very truth

a deep significance?

Her answer made him seethingly angry. An ungovernable feeling rose up

in him spirally. It was as an adder stinging him in the dark. He could

not seize it, for he knew not what or where it was. He could not escape

from it. The pain was horrible.

Esther knew nothing of these violent emotions. She had no more

intuition of him than he had of her. That sense by which natures

attuned exchange thoughts without words was impossible between them.

Between Esther and Aaron it already existed: it always had. But it was

unacknowledged.

Enoch passed three days without seeing Esther, hoping she might send

for him. On the fourth day he went to dinner and she treated him as

if nothing were the matter. She hardly knew there was. That made it

much worse. Then he flourished the wound by pretending heroically

to conceal it. That method will work only provided the woman cares

and loves the child in her man. Esther did not care. She refused to

discover the hurt. The man’s last recourse is to injure the woman,

to ease himself by hurting her. Enoch became oppressive. He began to

mention the things that should be rendered unto Cæsar, categorically,

gratuitously; he revealed the laws of Gib; he appointed how the

concavities of her life should correspond to the convexities of his; he

spoke of penalties, forfeits and consequences, and of the ancient legal

principle that ignorance of the statutes is no defence provided the

statutes have been duly published. She listened with wide-open eyes.

He believed he inspired her with admiration for the stern stuff he was

made of, and thus blindly sought his fate.

So his hurt was revenged but in no wise healed.

On the eve of their wedding day, at dinner, Aaron’s name was

pronounced. The invisible circumstances were tragic. Enoch happened at

that instant to be regarding Esther with a sensation that was new to

him and very disturbing. He knew not what to do with it. Suddenly he

had been seized with a great longing for her, a yearning of the heart

toward the fact of her being that was savage, tender and desolate.

He wondered that Esther and her father both were not aware of this

singular and dramatic occurrence. It shook him like an earth tremor. An

impulse to speak, to shout, to cry out words of fantastic meaning, to

rise and touch her, became almost uncontrollable,--almost. It occurred

to him for the first time, like a blow, that he had never discovered

her nature, her true self. He had not tried. The importance of doing

so, the possibility of it, had not been thought of. But he would. He

would begin all over again to get acquainted with her.

In that moment he loved her.

And it was then,--just then,--that he heard the sound of Aaron’s name.

He could not say which one of them uttered it. The sound was all he

knew. Instantly the hideous, stinging adder upraised from his depths

and began striking at the walls of his breast. Vividly, stereoptically,

as a series of pictures, there flashed across his mental vision every

situation in which he had seen Aaron and Esther together.

He had been able to control the impulse of love to vent its untimely

ecstasy; his rage he could not govern.

To Esther’s and her father’s amazement he began, with no apparent

provocation whatever, to utter against Aaron defamations of an extreme

and irrevocable character. His manner contradicted the violence of

his feelings. It was self-possessed, one would almost say restrained;

that was his way under stress of emotional excitement. At no point did

he become incoherent. His words were chilled and came to him easily.

One might have thought he was thinking out loud, very earnestly, in

solitude. On his face was that singular Gib expression, never witnessed

before in the Mitchell household,--the mouth contortion one mistook for

a smile. So far as Esther and Mitchell could see the performance was

gratuitous and premeditated. It had gone far before they realized that

his state was one of passion. But that discovery had no mitigating

value. They made no effort to stop him. He spoke of things that are

supposed to be unmentionable, and of his private intentions, and closed

abruptly with the declaration that Aaron should never be received in

his house as a guest.

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

table and departed.

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

perfect mask.

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

“Yes,” she said.

“What? What?”

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

she said.

And now Bruno Mitchell suffered another shock. For the first time in

her life Esther rose from the table and left him there.

She went to her room, sent her maid to bed, and sat for a long time

perfectly still, at the core of a maelstrom, her emotions whirling and

seething around her. They were her emotions. She recognized them as

such. Only, they were outside of her. This had always been true. Even

before she understood what it meant, her mother, a stoic, began to say:

“Don’t give way to your feelings. They will swallow you up. Watch them.

If you can see them they cannot hurt you.” So she had watched them

fearfully. To do that she had to put them outside. She had seen them

grow, change and rise until they engulfed her, and then the only way

she could save herself was to give them that whirling motion, which

caused them to incline from her, as the waters of the whirlpool incline

from the center. But it was harder and harder to keep them whirling and

she dared not stop, for if she did they would swallow her up.

The spectacle became awesome and fascinating, as a maelstrom is, and

there were moments when the perverse impulse to stop, surrender, cast

herself headlong away, was almost irresistible. She thought of this as

equivalent to suicide. And she had for a long time secretly supposed

it would ultimately happen. Now she was terrified and thrilled by a

premonition that it was imminent. Never had the waters been so mad, so

giddy, so nearly ungovernable, so excitingly desirable.

That is all she was thinking of,--if it may be called thinking,--as

she started up, drew on walking boots, took a shawl and descended

the stairs. In the hallway she met her father. He looked at her with

surprise.

“Are you going out?”

“For a walk,” she said.

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

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

There was a note in her voice he had never heard before. She wished him

to say yes, he forbade it. That was why she asked the question. And if

he had said that the whirling flood would have collapsed at once. That

again was all she was thinking. It was a wild, liberating thought. But

instead he took a step toward her and scrutinized her face.

“Esther, what has happened to you?”

“On the eve of my wedding, for the first and last time, for an hour

perhaps, I shall be Esther herself, alone,” she said.

Since the unprecedented uproar of the inclined waters had begun an hour

before she had not once thought of her wedding. The word of it, as now

it came to her lips, seemed strange and fantastic, and yet she had made

no resolve against it.

Her father stood aside and she passed out.

Half an hour later the knocker sounded and Mitchell himself went to the

door, expecting to receive Esther. There was Enoch. He asked to see her.

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

She can’t be long returning.”

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

meet her.

He had come to mend the impression he was conscious of having left

behind him. At least that was the ostensible reason. That was what

he would have said. The fact was that the adder had suddenly slunk

away, and once more came that feeling for Esther which was so new and

irrational and caused his heart to stagger back and forth. It was

stronger than before,--stronger than pride. He could scarcely breathe

for the ache of wanting to see her again that night....

Esther turned first toward the river path, changed her direction

aimlessly, walked for some distance toward the limestone quarry, then

suddenly swung around, passed the blast furnaces, and presently, only

her feet aware of how they came there, she was high on the mountain

path to Throne Rock. She had been walking too fast. Her breath began

to fail. She sat on a log to rest. The moon came up. The log was the

same fallen tree trunk on which she sat with her dogwood flowers the

day Aaron turned round, came back, and invited her to a farewell dinner

party. She knew it all the time. The scene restored itself, with all

the feelings it had evoked, and she did not push them back. They

detached themselves from the whirling mass and touched her. There was

a moment in which she could not remember anything that had happened

since; and in that moment, as an integral part of it, the figure of

Aaron appeared, walking toward her from above, exactly as before.

She sat so still he might almost have passed her. He did not start.

For a long time he stood looking at her. She did not move. He

could not see her face. Then without speaking he sat beside her,

at a little distance, on the log. The tree frogs informed on one

another--_peep_-ing--_peep_-ing. A dry twig falling made a crashing

sound. Far away below, at regular intervals, shrill whistle blasts

denoted stages in the ring of smelting alchemies.

Aaron spoke.

“What day is tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” said Esther.

They were silent until the whistle blew again.

“At ten o’clock,” said Aaron.

“At ten o’clock,” said Esther.

The exchange of wordless thoughts went on and on, and Aaron was

expecting what she said.

“I do not love him.”

“He loves you,” said Aaron.

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

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

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

wives and sweethearts?”

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

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

that?”

“No, he could not.”

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

“No,” said Aaron.

“Then should the woman tell?”

“Tell whom?” asked Aaron, trembling.

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

Aaron slowly dropped his head between his hands. She could feel his

body shake. A roaring blackness filled her eyes. She rose and would

have gone, but he enfolded her, with arms that touched her lightly,

almost not at all at first, then tightened, tightened, tightened, until

her life was crushed to his, and all the waters fell.

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

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

And she was satisfied.

How long they stood so, either thus or as it was, gazing one upon the

other, with no words to say,--how long they never knew. A sound of

footsteps very near broke their ecstasy, and there stood Enoch.

They had no sense of guilt. They were shy and startled from the shock

of coming back to earth.

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

behind him.

At that Enoch turned away and laughed.

Twenty paces on his way he laughed again.

When he was out of sight he laughed.

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

The sound of his laughter reverberated, echoed, swirled, went and

returned, filled the whole valley, blasting the night. Then when he was

far off he uttered a piercing scream. It rose on the air like a rocket,

hissed, burst with a soft splash and pitched off into space, and the

world for a moment was deathly still. The tree frogs were the first to

recover and began frantically to fill up the void.

Aaron touched Esther. They descended. She inquired of him nothing;

he informed her of nothing. They did not speak again for hours. They

walked to the Woolwine mansion. He called for horses, a light vehicle,

and wraps. And all that night they drove, past the setting moon, into

the darkness, through the dawn, toward Wilkes-Barre.

Next day at noon they were married.