The partnership of Gib and Breakspeare was sundered.
Two weeks later, when Aaron returned to the little red office building
across the road from the mill, he found on his desk a paper marked
“Articles of Dissolution.” Attached was a note of two lines from Enoch,
saying: “Let any changes proposed to be made herein appear in the form
of writing, or through an attorney at law.”
They never spoke again.
The articles prepared by Enoch provided that the ore and coal lands,
which had been pooled on a royalty basis, should release from that
agreement and revert to their respective owners; that the eight blast
furnaces should be divided equally, four and four; that Gib should buy
from Breakspeare, for cash, his interest in the rolling mill, because
it could not be divided, the price to be one-half the original cost,
according to the books, and that all the money in the firm’s treasury,
less current liabilities, should be halved on the date of signature.
Aaron read the paper once through, put it down and signed it. The
terms were unfair. Yet he had no impulse to change them. They were
unfair because nothing was made of those two intangible assets
which sometimes in business are worth more than the physical
properties--namely, spirit of organization and good will of trade--all
of which would automatically belong to the one who bought out the
other’s interest in the mill. This was so because the mill was now the
crown of the business. What the firm sold was no longer pig iron, as at
first, but wrought iron in standard bars manufactured from the pig by
remelting, kneading, hammering and rolling it. The product of the blast
furnaces, instead of going to market, only fed the mill.
What would Aaron do?
He could not sell the product of his blast furnaces to Enoch. Business
transactions between them were unimaginable; besides, no sooner were
the articles of dissolution signed than Enoch went about building four
more blast furnaces of his own. That was to make himself independent
of Aaron’s product. Aaron, therefore, might choose between seeking
a market outside for his pig iron or building a mill to work it. To
build a mill would require, first, a large outlay of capital, then
an organization of expert workers and superintendents, and thirdly
a market for his wrought iron in competition with the product of
the established mill, now Enoch’s. For of course Enoch’s iron would
continue to be called Damascus Iron, which was its trade name, and it
was already famous in the country for its fine texture and purity.
Aaron’s might be just as good, but it would have to take a new name and
earn its own good will.
Well, but what he did was unexpected. He drew the fires from his blast
furnaces and went to Europe with Esther.
It was more than a honeymoon, or less, as you may happen to think. In
Aaron’s case romance and work were easily combined, for as love is
an adventure of the spirit, so to a man of his temperament work is a
romantic enterprise of the mind and creative in a manner less wonderful
than the mysterious life process only because we take it for granted.
What is an engine? a steamship? a blast furnace? a tower? It is the
materialization in form and function of an idea itself imponderable. It
is the psychic power of man exteriorized in substance and there is no
accounting for such phenomena save that it happens. Who knows but the
Gods are as much puzzled by that form of glow worm full of parasites
that we call a railroad train as we are by the things of cosmic origin?
Specifically Aaron was in quest of a secret that had eluded and baffled
iron masters always. They were sure it existed. That certainty was
deducible from the data of knowledge. Many times they had almost
touched it; then it was lost again, like a coy, tantalizing vision
of loveliness, and the pursuers were discouraged. Still, they never
gave up. Whoever found it would be made exceedingly rich and the iron
industry at the same time would be revolutionized.
It is to be explained.
Everybody probably knows that in the first place all the iron was
trapped in the blazing heart of the earth. It forms no part anywhere of
the earth’s true granite crust. But it was rebellious and indigestible
and had to be spewed up from the inflamed Plutonic belly through the
tops of volcanoes. At that time volcanoes were near or under water
generally, and when the molten iron came jetting forth in red lava
streams a spectacular melodrama was enacted. Water was its adverse
element. At the lava’s touch the oceans boiled, hissed, upheaved and
draped themselves in steam. They were not hurt really; they were
outraged.
What happened to the lava?
The water shivered it to atoms and cast it high upon the wind as dust
and ashes.
In that free and irresponsible condition iron travelled far, made his
bed in many places, took up with new and strange affinities,--the
flapper sisters Chlorine, the Sulphur Gerties, the lazy Nitrate Susans,
the harmless Silicates, a score of others known and unknown, and most
of all with a comfortable, indispensable element called Oxygen. The
extent and variety of his embracings may be imagined from the fact that
he is never found in a state of unattached purity save now and then
when he falls from the heavens as a meteorite. In these haphazard,
bigamous earthly alliances he is of no avail to man. The problem is how
to disentangle him,--how to divorce him from his undesirable affinities
and wed him durably and in a lawful manner to those elements which
supplement his power.
It becomes extremely complicated when you begin seriously to consider
it. How shall one be divorced from many miscellaneous affinities? You
have to have been regularly wedded in order to get divorced. Well, the
only way is the long, pragmatic way. You wed him to the affinities
that are to be legally got rid of and then divorce him from them.
Now take it: The iron ore is in the ore bed, embracing those other
elements at random, particularly Oxygen. First you oxidize him by
roasting. That is, you wed him to Oxygen; you give him Oxygen until
he is sick of it. Then you melt him down with coal in a furnace to
deoxidize him--to divorce him, that is to say, from his affinity
Oxygen. It is the first fiery ordeal. But at the same time you wed him
to Carbon. Thus deoxidized and carbonized, divorced and wedded by one
stroke, he becomes pig iron.
The wedding with Carbon, however, is not permanent. It has been
contracted so to speak under duress, a miserable makeshift, because
his earthly nature is such that he must be wedded to something all the
time. Besides, there is now too much Carbon for his own good. So you
melt him again and divorce him from Carbon, by the unexpected method of
blowing Oxygen through him. At the end of this second ordeal he is free
of both Carbon and Oxygen, many other elements have disappeared also,
and you have wrought iron, practically pure, limp and malleable.
Now suppose you want to make him hard. You want to convert him into
steel. In that case you melt him a third time and wed him permanently
to a small amount of Carbon, more or less, the amount to be governed by
the degree of hardness required. That makes steel. But to make it has
required one roasting and three meltings.
The dream of the iron masters, beginning with the 19th century, was
to make it all one continuous, fluid process, and bring the complete
result to pass at one melting. If that could be done the cost of
production would be enormously reduced.
The discovery of such a method now seemed imminent in either England
or Germany. Many experts were pressing on the door. Suddenly it would
fly open and whoever was there at the moment would be able to seize the
secret. Rumors of success had been heard, disbelieved, denied, scoffed
at and repeated. Aaron believed them, or believed at least that if the
secret had not already been captured it was about to be. That was his
quest in Europe.
After a year he returned with a steel making patent, enormous
quantities of queer looking material, a crew of expert English
erectors, and proceeded to build what the curious Damascenes called a
concern. That word was in lieu of a proper name for an object which,
without being supernatural, was unique on earth. In shape it somewhat
resembled a gigantic snail shell, in a vertical position, open end up,
thirty feet high, made of iron plates bolted together, lined with fire
clay and so mounted at its axis that it could be tipped to spill its
contents. On the same foundation was mounted a blowing engine to force
air at high pressure through perforations in the bottom of the shell;
and there was also a great ladle in chains for hoisting molten metal to
its mouth.
The work of construction was slow and tedious; it came several times
to a full stop for want of something that had not been provided
beforehand and could not be made on the spot. Nearly another year
passed.
Then one day smoke appeared at the top of one of Aaron’s four blast
furnaces and people by this sign were notified that the great
experiment was about to begin. In a general way the population knew,
from what the workers said, that the intention was to produce steel and
to produce it direct from the ore, and also that if such a thing were
possible the iron industry would undergo a basic transformation.
All of that was exciting and very important, especially to a town
like New Damascus, whose living was in iron. Yet it was no technical
interest in a metallurgical process that moved people to gather in
large numbers to witness the experiment. What they sensed was its
human meaning. It symbolized a struggle between the former partners.
The outcome might deeply affect the economic position of New Damascus
in the course of time. Immediately it had tense dramatic value. It
would prove which was the greater man and which was right,--Aaron who
believed steel cheaply produced in large quantities by a continuous
one-melt process would supersede iron and bring a new age to pass, or
Enoch who scoffed, who was known privately to have predicted Aaron’s
ruin, and who held that to think of getting steel direct from ore in
that manner, skipping the iron stage, was as absurd as to think of
getting a grandson from a grandfather, skipping the father. It was
contrary to the way of nature.
All the iron wisdom of the community was with Enoch. All the inert
scepticism with which people behold the trial of a new thing was on
his side. But the heart was for Aaron. Everybody liked him still,
as in the old days, and ardently wished him success. Besides, if he
brought it off, Enoch Gib would be humbled. His tyrannical ways were
increasingly complained of. New Damascus would rather be a steel town
under Aaron than an iron town under Enoch.
With the outcome in suspense, the experiment itself was worth seeing as
a spectacle. Nothing like it could have been imagined.
First, that strange, enormous tilting vessel, resembling a snail shell,
was filled with fuel and fired under blast from the blowing engine
until its clay-lined interior was white hot. Then it was tilted on its
axis, emptied and tilted back again. Next the molten iron from the
blast furnace, instead of being run off in the sand to make the sow the
pigs devour, was tapped into that great ladle in chains, hoisted on
high, and poured into the white hot gullet of the tilting vessel. At
the same time the blowing engine to force air through the perforations
in the bottom was set in fast motion with a terrible roar. A blast of
air at high pressure began now to pass upward through the fluid metal.
A series of awesome pyrotechnics ensued.
In the belly of the tilting vessel occurred a dry, chortling sound,
followed by a dull, regular clapping, as of Plutonic amusement and
applause. From the mouth of the vessel issued millions of sparks,
particles burning brilliantly in the air. This went on for seven or
eight minutes. Suddenly the sparks went out and a dull, sluggish red
flame appeared, turning bright and yellowish, then becoming high,
brilliant and dart-like. After several minutes terrific detonations
began to take place in the vessel. With each detonation the flame shot
higher. This uproar was succeeded by a period of calm. The yellowish,
dart-like flame rising from the throat of the vessel was replaced by
a long, white flame, which stood for several seconds proudly, then
trembled, tore at the edges and abruptly collapsed. Dense black smoke
issued from the mouth of the crater and the scene was dark. This was
the moment at which the metal itself began to burn. The workers,
uttering shrill cries of anxiety, readiness, encouragement and
damnation, seized the levers controlling the vessel and tilted it over
to a spilling position. Through the black smoke that corked its throat
burst the fluid, blazing metal, hissing like a tortured serpent, alive
in every incandescent crystal, yet doomed quickly to cool and blacken,
every element touching it being fatally adverse. Men in waiting caught
it headfirst neatly into a trundle pot and wheeled it off to be
decanted into sand molds, like pig iron molds, but smaller.
The experiment was finished. The test was yet to come. That waited on
the cooling. What was in those molds? Those squarish lumps blackening
in the sand,--what would they turn out to be? No one knew.
Aaron waited until one was cool enough to handle. Then placing it like
a stick of kindling against the chopping block, he hit it one blow in
the middle with a sledge hammer. It broke with an ironic, ringing
sound and lay in two pieces apart. He never stooped to pick them up.
Without a word he dropped the hammer and walked away.
Esther received him on the terrace. She had been there for hours,
anxiously watching the spectacle from afar, then waiting for him to
come and tell her what the outcome was. But he did not have to tell
her. She knew by his look, by his walk, by the way he took her arm.
They sat for some time in silence.
“It beats me,” he said. “I can’t explain it. I don’t know what
happened.”
“What was it like?” she asked. “The product I mean--was it iron or
steel?”
“Pot metal,” he said contemptuously.
For a long time they stood there on the terrace looking their thoughts
into space. Hers were personal. His were not. This she knew. There is
probably no sense of loneliness so poignant as that which a woman feels
when the idol of her being disembodies his soul and departs with it,
leaving in her hands the fact of his empty presence. Lacking in herself
his power of abstraction she cannot understand this phenomenon. But
she verifies it and it fills her with terror. The form is there at her
side, even in her arms, as it was a moment before. The man is gone. She
has no idea where he is or what he is doing.
“Aaron!”
Esther whispered his name as one who dreads to wake the sleeper and yet
cannot forbear to do so. Impulsively she buried her face beneath his
arm as if she would enter the vacant premises. He laid his arm around
her shoulder. It was an absent gesture. She had not waked him quite.
“Aaron!” she called again. “What does it matter? Come back to me.”
At that he started slightly and began to talk in a slow, far-away
manner, very much as he had talked to Enoch that moonlight night after
the birthday party when the idea of making New Damascus an iron town
had suddenly crystallized in his mind. Esther, loving the mere sound of
his voice, did not at first get the sense of his speech. He was saying:
“Out there in unlimited space are the unborn....”
These were the first words she understood. They thrilled her. She was
almost faint with an ecstasy that ran through her fibre up and down.
“So,” she thought, “it was that.” And she had been thinking he was far
away. Now she listened tensely. He went on:
“... Millions, infinite millions, clamoring to get born, perhaps dying
because they cannot cross. Here is life on this side. There, out there,
is but the hope of it.”
“Cross what?” asked Esther, awesomely. “You speak as if you were gazing
at it.”
“Between life that is and life unborn I see the primal chasm,” he said.
“We who live have crossed. We do not remember how. The number that
can cross is small. You cannot imagine how small it is. Only one in
millions has the luck to get across. The rest are crowded on the edge,
weeping, reaching out their hands, silently imploring us to get them
over. They struggle, overwhelm themselves and fall into the void like
a cataract.”
“Why is that?” asked Esther.
“Because the number that can cross is limited by the preparations of
the living,” Aaron answered. “The living are selfish and forgetful.
All this I see as it has been for ages, as now it is, and as it shall
be. Always it has been as it is on the other side--that infinite,
voiceless, despairing multitude pressing down to the brink of the
void. Here in the world of the living there has been some change. We
have the power of preparation. How pitiably we have exercised it! I’ll
tell you all that has ever happened. Long ago, before he began by
imagination to extend his faculties, man was like the other animals. He
had only his hands and legs, his sheer brute strength, to work with.
He housed himself in holes and caves and ate what the untilled earth
set forth. You must imagine then across that primal chasm a chain of
human bodies, a living monkey bridge, by which the unborn came to life
most dangerously. How few they were! And yet, if more had come just
then they would have starved,--died here instead of there,--because
the means did not exist to house and clothe and feed them. It is man’s
business not only to bridge the chasm; he must also beforehand prepare
the world for those who cross. Come ten thousand years through time
this way. Now see him beginning to till the soil. See him building
huts. More life may be sustained. Above the void a swaying bridge
of sticks. More may safely get across. And yet so very few! Another
thousand years. Enter historic man. He builds him cities and fine
temples and there is a narrow stone arch to span the void. The bridge,
as you will note, is at any time of that material in which mankind is
working. This is better. The unborn begin to rush across. But, alas!
the case is worse than ever. Many now are born that never will be fed.
Why?
“Imagine the world at this time in panorama. There are cities, noble
cities walled about; but they are few and very far apart, and the world
at large is still an untilled waste. Tillage is in small adjacent
areas, and when the produce of those areas is not enough the people in
the cities starve. Further away are vast fertile plains uncultivated.
They are of no use because food cannot be transported thousands of
miles in great quantities. The art of transportation is undiscovered.
Hence frightful famines on the bounteous earth. Then in his imagination
man finds a ship. That makes it possible to transport food long
distances, and yet the world is hardly touched. Life is increasable
only on the rim of the sea and in the valleys of rivers. An inland city
is impossible.
“At length the iron age. It is our time. By mechanical means man has
enormously increased his power to prepare the world for that infinite
multitude unborn. It is tremendously excited--the voiceless, spectral
multitude. It presses more wildly toward the void. An iron bridge has
replaced the stone arch. It is a sign that many more may come. Now with
railroads it is possible to bring food quickly from afar. No fertile
area of the earth is inaccessible. Inland cities may begin to rise.
More life in more ways can be sustained than ever before. Nevertheless,
the iron bridge is a premature sign. The material is defective. It is
not hard enough to bear the strain of that host pressing upon life.
Besides, by no process yet discovered can it be made fast enough.
“And I see what has not yet happened. I see whole cities built higher
than the tower of Babel. Those are steel buildings, sheathed with
brick and stone. Brick and stone upon mortar would not stand so high.
To serve but one of these cities,--to bring its food and take away
its manufactures,--I see a thousand railroad trains,--trains of steel
running on rails of steel. Compared with these the iron shod trains
we know and think so marvellous are merely toys. I see ships of steel
so vast in size that on the side of one the little vessel in which
Columbus found a new world would swing like a silly skiff. I see steel
in all its power--towers, tunnels, aqueducts, fantastic structures I
cannot sense the meaning of. I see miles of smoking chimneys where
steel is made for all these uses in unimaginable quantities. And
spanning the prismal chasm I see a series of great steel bridges,
multiplying as I look, seeming to cast themselves in air across the
void like cobwebs. But reflect! We have not yet discovered the way to
make this steel. Unless we find it quickly we shall fail that unborn
host. It cannot get across; if it did it could not live. The iron
bridge cannot bear its weight. Nor can the world be prepared with iron.
These things of iron are premature, too soft, too slowly made, not big
enough. Now do you know what it is we seek?”
“Forgive me. I did not mean to speak lightly of it,” Esther said. “None
of this had been revealed to me.”
“Nor to me,” said Aaron. “Not clearly until this instant. Man works
mostly in the dark, without knowing what he seeks or why....”
They repeated the experiment many times, never with precisely the same
technical result, though always with the same disappointment. The metal
they got was worthless. It was neither iron nor steel. The process was
true. It remarkably foreshadowed the Bessemer process which some years
later did achieve the result, revolutionize the industry and cause
steel to overlap iron. It failed in Aaron’s hands for want of skill and
chemical knowledge. The elements are not passive. They are wilful and
rebellious. In their efforts to thwart man’s designs upon them they
become cunning and clannish. One helps the other to escape. With this
same mechanical equipment steel workers of a later time would have been
able to make a perfect steel. They would have known how at a certain
stage of the process to cast into the fiery, detonating mass a handful
of some tame, cajoling substance, and then the exact instant at which
to stop the air blast and tilt the vessel to a spilling position.
Aaron was discouraged but not despairing. Half his fortune was gone.
Still, it was not an irretrievable disaster.
To hold his organization together he built a small rolling mill. He
called it the Blue Jay. The site on which it stood may still be seen in
New Damascus after all these years. Nothing else has ever occupied it.
The mill was large enough to keep two blast furnaces going,--that is,
it absorbed their output of pig iron. This was merely to fill a gap. He
was bent upon steel. Having opened the mill and having found a market
for all the Blue Jay iron it could make, again he took Esther and went
to Europe on the same quest as before.
While they were abroad a son was born. They named him John.
On the homeward voyage Esther died and was buried at sea. The waters at
last did swallow her up.
Aaron returned to New Damascus with a new steel making patent, an
infant and an empty heart.
What there was in the patent nobody ever knew. He did nothing with it.
The whole steel adventure was too intimately associated with memories
of Esther. To succeed without her would be worse than to fail. He could
not think of it. There was very little in this world he could think
of. He could not bear living in the mansion without her. He closed it
and went to live at the inn with his child and nurse. Then presently
he could not bear living in New Damascus without her. People said
it was the state of his fortunes that made him morose. He had meant
to retrieve his fortunes with Esther standing by. Now he neglected
business, caring nothing about it, until one day he came awake to the
fact that even so little business as it takes to support a lone man
and child will not attend to itself. He had to do something. But he
could not do it there.
One day he dismantled the mill, loaded it in a canal boat, abandoned
the irremovable blast furnaces, took his child in his arms and
disappeared.
The Blue Jay Rolling Mill became famous not for its output but for its
migrations. He set it up in Scranton, then moved it to Pittsburgh. It
was next reported in Texas and after that in Colorado. Then he ceased
to be heard of, except once, when the old Woolwine Mansion was sold to
a Roman Catholic order.
So he vanished from the light of New Damascus, with his steel patent,
his grief and the fourth generation in swaddling cloths,--vanished away
on a flying iron mill.