Meanwhile what of Enoch?
He prospered in power and wealth and his soul turned black. From his
birth he had been cruel, legal, injurious. The tragedy of Esther’s
elopement left a horrible sting in his face for everyone to see. After
that he became, as the Damascenes said, unnatural. In that word they
characterized and judged his conduct; they never understood it. They
could not say in what his unnaturalness consisted. His acts were not
unnatural as acts in themselves, nor in contrast, sum or degree. They
were unnatural because they were his. He disbelieved in friendship; he
knew it not and doubted its existence. He disbelieved in love, too,
though not for the same reason.
Esther he had loved.
A man mortally hurt in love may do almost anything naturally. He is
sick prey for the cuckoo woman willing to lay her egg in another’s
nest. She has only to touch him with her fingers softly and hold her
tongue, but to make a soothing, mothering sound, and he will impale
himself without looking.
But Jonet, daughter of Gearhard the blacksmith, was not that kind
of woman. She could not have made that sound. And it seemed somehow
unnatural that Enoch should marry her. No sound that was in him could
imaginably vibrate in her. According to the local notion the girl was
queer. Men let her alone because she made them vaguely uneasy. Her
phantasies were of the primeval outdoors. She was sometimes seen in the
deep woods by herself, dancing and singing as if she were not alone.
She named the trees and conversed with non-existent objects. Her hair
was black. Her eyes were brown and glistened. Her face was the color
of iron at cherry-red heat and she had the odor of a wild thing. Enoch
married her out of hand. There was no courtship. Then he proceeded to
build a mansion on the west hill larger and more ostentatiously ugly
than the Woolwine Mansion on the east hill. Some said, “Ah-ha! He has
learned his lesson. No woman would live in that gloomy iron stone
house.” Others said he did it neither in wisdom nor in love of Jonet,
but to spite Bruno Mitchell, who, though he was blameless of anything
that had happened, was yet Esther’s father.
A peculiarity of the Gib mansion was much talked of at the time. It was
built on a twin principle,--that is, in halves, separated only by an
imaginary bisecting line. Each half was as like the other as the right
hand is like the left. There were two portals exactly alike, two halls,
two parlors, two grand stairways, two kitchens, everything in parallel
duplication until it came to the enormous solarium, which was a glass
court between the two parts, the imaginary line cutting through the
fountain in the center. The Philadelphia architect supposed there were
two families. When he discovered it was all for one man and one wife
not yet long enough married to have children he could not conceal his
wonder.
“Well, why not?” said Enoch. “Haven’t you two lungs, two kidneys, two
ears? One of each would do.”
The idea may have been thus derived from a principle of insurance
through pairing which nature has evolved. It may have been.
Nevertheless in time the imaginary dividing line became real. It was
painted through the middle of the solarium. Jonet lived on one side
and he on the other and there was no going to and fro,--not for Jonet.
Agnes, their daughter, was brought to his side by the nurses until she
was big enough to walk. She could cross the line as she pleased. But
generally she had to be coaxed or bribed to cross to Enoch’s side and
was always anxious to cross back.
Between Enoch and Mitchell the subject of Esther was never mentioned,
not even at first. For a while they went on as if nothing had happened.
Gradually Mitchell became aware that Enoch was putting pressure upon
him, silently, deliberately. He made harder and harder terms for the
banker’s services, until Mitchell’s profit in the relationship was
destroyed, and when this fact was pointed out to Enoch he suggested a
simple remedy, which was that the relationship should discontinue. As
Mitchell seemed disinclined to act on this suggestion Enoch at length
invited a Wilkes-Barre man to come and open a bank in New Damascus.
Enoch himself provided most of the capital. The town’s business went
to the new bank naturally. It was Gib’s bank and Gib was a man to
be propitiated in the community. Moreover, his turning from Mitchell
caused Mitchell’s bank to be regarded with a tinge of doubt. Thus
Mitchell’s hope in the star of iron miserably perished. His bank
withered up. His years becoming heavy he returned to New England to die.
The saying was that Enoch broke him. It would have been quite as easy
to say that Mitchell broke himself upon Enoch. Yet in putting it
the other way people implied a certain subtle truth wherein lay the
difference between Enoch Gib and other men,--the fact of his being
unnatural. His feeling toward Mitchell was natural. Anyone could
understand that. It was a feeling transferred from Esther to her
father. Because he loved Esther he could not hate her as much as his
hurt required; therefore he hated her father more. But where another
man would have manifested this feeling in some overt, unmistakable
manner, Enoch so concealed it that for a long time Mitchell did not
suspect its existence. And when he was aware of it, then it was too
late. If Enoch had committed upon him some definite act of unreason
that would have seemed natural. Instead, he exerted against him a kind
of slow, deadly hydraulic pressure. Nor was that all. Revenge may
require the infliction of a protracted remorseless torture. Even that
one may understand. But Gib, while exerting this killing pressure,
apparently had no more feeling about it than one would have about an
automatic, self-recording test for torsional strength applied to a
piece of iron, knowing that ultimately it was bound to break. If he
had enjoyed it, if he had seemed to derive malicious satisfaction from
the sequel, that would have made it human.
Yet here was a man but bearing witness for the child. The trait
of character which appeared in his locked arm game with Aaron, in
their boyhood, when it was Aaron’s arm that broke, now fulfilled
itself. There was in him a strange passion for trying the strength of
materials. He invented various mechanical devices for that purpose. He
knew to an ounce what iron would stand under every kind of strain. He
knew what it took to crush a brick. Apparently his first thought on
looking at anything was, “What is its breaking point?” The only way
to find out was to break it. And people to him were like any other
kind of material. He had the same curiosity about them. What could
they stand without breaking? As in human material the utmost point of
resistance is a variable factor, he had to find it over and over. It is
by no means certain that the mood in which he exercised this passion
was deliberately destructive. That the final point of resistance is
coincident with the point of destruction probably never once occurred
to him as a tragic fact.
He might have said of people that in any case they were free to decline
the test. They were not obliged to measure their strength with his. Yet
they did it and they did it as if they could not help doing it. Here
was a strange matter.
For example, how did he hold his iron workers? They hated him. They
cursed him. Their injuries were as open sores that would not heal.
Take the case of McAntee. It was typical. Tom McAntee was one of the
best puddlers in the world. On a very hot day at the puddling furnace,
in the midst of a heat, with six hundred weight of good iron bubbling
like gravy, turning waxy and almost ready to be drawn, Tom dropped
the beater he was working it with, wobbled a bit, put his hand to his
head, and said he guessed he’d have to knock off and go home. Enoch,
who watched every heat, was standing there. He called Tom’s assistant
to take up the beater and then without a word he handed Tom a blue
ticket. The significance of the blue ticket was this: A man in Gib’s
mill had three chances with failure,--that is, he was entitled to three
dismissals. The first was a yellow ticket. That was a rebuke. After
three days he could come back to his job. The second dismissal was with
a red ticket. That was a warning. It meant two weeks off. Then he might
try again. But the third time it was a blue ticket, and that was final.
He could never come back. So McAntee was fired for good, and this was
without precedent under the rules because that was the first ticket he
had ever got. The next day Enoch sent a clerk to McAntee’s house with
Tom’s wages. A widow received them. Tom was dead.
The man who picked up Tom’s beater and went on with the heat that day,
all the men of the puddling and heating crews, every man in the mill,
even the miners back in the mountains,--they were all white with rage
and horror, yet not one of them fumbled a stroke of labor, or quit,
or thought of quitting. The effect of this incident, in fact, was to
lift the breaking point through the whole organization. Those who had
already had yellow and red tickets went on for years and died without
ever getting a blue one. Many were dismissed. Almost never did a man
quit. Why? Because, more than anything else in the world they feared
Enoch Gib’s contempt for the man who broke. They could stand his
cruelty; they could not bear his scorn. Also, in a strange way, the men
themselves shared his contempt for the one who broke. They would not
acknowledge it; they tried hard to conceal it. Yet a man could not quit
without feeling inferior, not only in the sight of the tyrant but in
the eyes of his fellow workers.
The demon who ruled them had no breaking point. Continuously day and
night he walked among them like a principle of evil, calling to a
spirit of demonry within them,--a spirit that racked their bodies,
scared their souls, and responded in spite of their reason. A maddened
hand would sometimes be raised against him. He never flinched. He was
derisive. The hand would drop. He never gave a man a ticket for that.
Brains were another problem. He treated it separately, though in the
same way and with the same consequences. Any inquisitive young man
wishing to learn the iron business could begin at the bottom. He might
begin in the mill and work toward the office or begin in the office
and work toward the mill. He was sure to move fast in either direction.
If he survived the ruthless selection that took place on the lower
rungs of the ladder he could count on gaining a small partnership in a
few years. An interest of two or three per cent. in the business was
more stimulating than wages. As the business grew the number of junior
partners increased. There might be six or eight at a time, all trying
to keep pace with Enoch. They emerged from the flux like a procession
of sparks, burned brightly for a little while and fell in darkness. He
used them up and bought them out.
In time the town of New Damascus, like the yard of his mill, was
littered with things Enoch Gib had strained to the breaking point.
Some, like Tom McAntee, were decently covered up in the cemetery.
Others were aimlessly walking about. Conspicuous among these were the
used up partners. They all had nice houses and plenty to live on. The
business was profitable. But they were withered and rickety, older than
old Enoch in the midst of their years, and had a baffled look in their
eyes.
The town became rich and famous. The mill was the source of its
greatness. There the first American rails were rolled. For twenty years
they were the best iron rails in the world. There iron nails were first
cut from a sheet, like cookies out of dough. Then the Civil War came
and iron that cost ten dollars a ton to make could be sold for fifty
and sixty.