John Breakspeare sat on the veranda of Lycoming House thinking of
this situation and of what he should do. His father’s old friends had
pursued him with offers of hospitality, and as he had to choose, he
chose that of Thaddeus, for two reasons. One was that he liked Thaddeus
extravagantly; the other was that living at the inn entailed no social
amenities. He was by no means a solitary person. Naturally he was
gregarious. But for the first time in his life he wished to be let
alone, and that great friendly hulk dozing in the hickory chair at the
end of the bar was the only person who had no meddling curiosity and
tactfully ignored his existence.
Well, first, there was no available estate, save only a few thousand
dollars in money. The wandering Blue Jay mill wore out at last. Aaron’s
final act of business was to sell its good-will to a corporation.
That was where the few thousand dollars came from. The plant itself
was scrapped for junk. The day after that had happened Aaron lay him
down with a fever and never got up again. John, in his junior year at
college, was summoned at once, at Aaron’s request, as if he knew he
were going to die. Yet he could not wait. He died the night before the
boy arrived.
His will, written by himself on a sheet of foolscap, was very simple:
“All I have whatsoever I leave to my son, John. There is no one else.”
Pinned to this was a personal note as follows:
“Boy of Esther, I am leaving you. Go straight and God bless you. Bury
me at New Damascus.”
The writing, though clear, was evidently an achievement of great
effort. He was dying then and was gone in less than an hour.
The old Woolwine holdings of ore and coal, though still intact, were
in a state of suspended development and not very valuable, perhaps
quite unsaleable. As for the ore, it would not pay to develop that any
further. The whole iron region was now beginning to be flooded with
cheap Mesaba ore from the head of the Great Lakes. Gib, in fact, was
already buying this ore for his blast furnaces. He could buy it for
less than the cost of producing his own. As for the coal, the only
market there had ever been for that was at the New Damascus blast
furnaces. Gib owned all the furnaces and had all the coal he needed.
Coal is coal, of course; it may be sold anywhere. But the Woolwine
holdings, which John Breakspeare inherited, were probably not large
enough to bear the capital that would be necessary to put New Damascus
coal into commercial competition with the output of the big established
collieries up the river.
These thoughts all wound up together in the young man’s meditations led
nowhere. They merely revolved. They fell into a kind of rhythm. The
same ideas kept repeating themselves in an obsessed, uncontrollable
manner. “I’m stupid,” he said, and got up to walk. Of a sudden he
became aware of what it was that had been making his thoughts go round
like that.
There was a throbbing in the air, a rythmic punctuation, a ceaseless
hollow murmur. He had heard this voice before, continuously in fact,
without attending to it. Now he listened. It came from the chest of the
great driving engine in the rolling mill, at the other side of town. It
said:
Wrought iron
Wrought iron
Wrought iron
Iron, iron.
The mill!
The mill his father founded!
Volcanic fires, incandescent difficulties, quick, elemental fluids,--in
these his father wrought and failed. Had not the son some pressing
business with that same Plutonic stuff? He moved as if he had. With no
shape of an idea in his mind he walked purposefully, stalking the voice
of the engine, and came to the rear of the mill.
It was evening.
He had never seen an iron mill before. For some time he stood outside
the gate, viewing it at large, smelling and tasting its fumes,
acquainting his senses with its moody roar. There was at first no
sign of human agency. Then he made out figures passing back and forth
through bolts of sudden light. They seemed solitary, silent, bored. The
notion crossed his fancy that man had tapped the earth of forces which
turned genii on his hands, enslaved him, commanded weary obedience and
in the end consumed him.
Now a shift was taking place. Night crews were coming on; day crews
were going out. Those arriving walked erect; their faces, white and
clean, showed vividly against the murky texture. Those going out were
limp and bent; their faces did not show at all. Twice a day they passed
like that, bodies healed by sleep and food relieving those all fagged
and bruised from a twelve-hour struggle with the genii. Puddlers,
heaters, hammermen and rollers were marked apart from common, unskilled
labor by leather aprons on their feet, tied round the ankles, flapping
as they walked.
Curious glances fell upon the young man idling there in the dusk.
Nobody spoke to him. On the gate was a painted sign: “Positively no
admittance.” The rule was rigid, even more so in Gib’s mill than at
any other in the country, and all iron working plants in those days
were guarded very jealously because spies went to and fro stealing
methods, formulas and ideas. The weakness of a rigid rule is that
everyone supposes it will be observed. No doubt the men who saw
Breakspeare enter took him to be a young man from the office. No
common trespasser would be so cool about it; a spy would make his
entrance surreptitiously. Whatwise, nobody stopped him. He went all the
way in and was swallowed up in the gloomy, swirling, glare-punctured
commotion. And once inside he could move freely from place to place. No
one paid him the slightest heed.
The air was torn, shattered, upheaved, compressed, pierced through, by
sounds of shock, strain, impact, clangor, cannonade and shrill whistle
blasts, occurring in any order of sequence, and then all at one time
dissolving in a moment of vast silence even more amazing to the ear.
Conversation would be possible only by shrieks close up. The men seemed
never to speak at their work. They did not communicate ideas by signs
either. Each man had his place, his part, his own pattern of action,
and did what he did with a kind of mechanical inevitability, as if it
were something he had never learned. They were related not to each
other but to the process, kept their eyes fixedly on it for obvious
reasons, and stepped warily. A false gesture might have immediate
consequences.
The process just then was that of rolling iron bars. From where
Breakspeare stood he saw the latter end of it. He saw the finished bars
spurt like dull red serpents from between the rolls. Two men standing
with their gaze on the running hole from which the reptile darted forth
snared it by the neck with tongs, walked slowly backward with it as
the rolls released the glowing body, until its tail came free; then
dragged it off, a tame, limp thing, turning black, and put it straight
along with others to cool.
The whole process could not be seen at once. It took place in a
train of events covering many acres of area. It could be followed
backward,--that is by going from the finished bars to the source of the
iron, or in the other direction downstream, from the puddling furnaces
where the iron is cooked, to the hammermen who mauled it into rough
shape and thence to the rolls. Breakspeare, having started that way,
traced it backward, from the finished bar to the source of its becoming.
He moved to a position from which he could see all that happened at the
rolls.
The rolls were merely enormous cylinders revolving together in gears,
with grooves through which to pass the malleable iron. The first groove
through which it passed was very large, the next one smaller, the
next one smaller still, until the last, out of which the final form
appeared. The iron had to be passed back and forth through each of
these grooves in turn.
On each side of the rolls stood men in pairs with tongs,--silent,
foreboding men, with masks on their faces and leather aprons on their
feet, singularly impassive and still, save in moments of action. At
intervals of two or three minutes a man came running with two hundred
weight of incandescent iron in the shape of a rough log five or six
feet long, held in tongs swung by a chain to an overhead rail, and
dropped it at the feet of the rollers. Becoming that instant alive,
the rollers picked it up with tongs, passed it through the first
groove of the rolls, giving it a handful of sand if it stuck, and then
stood again in that attitude of brooding immobility, leaning on their
tongs, looking at nothing, bathed in sparks as the tail of the iron
disappeared. On the other side of the rolls similar men with similar
tongs seized it as you would take a reptile by the neck in a cleft
stick, controlled and guided its wrigglings, turned and thrust its head
into the next smaller groove. Thus they passed and repassed it through
the rolls, catching it each time by the neck and returning it through a
smaller groove. Each time it was longer, more sinuous, less dangerous,
until at last, with the final pass, it became what Breakspeare had
first seen, namely, a finished wrought iron bar, ready to cool.
From the rolls he moved to the tilthammers. At corresponding intervals
the hammermen received on tongs from the puddling furnace two hundred
weight of iron in the form of a flaming dough ball, laid it on a block,
turned it under the blows of the tilthammer falling like a pile driver
from above, until it was the shape of a log, fit to be passed through
the rolls. Then helpers, lifting it in tongs, ran with it to the
rollers.
Beyond the tilthammers were the puddling furnaces. There the process
began.
A puddling furnace is a long, narrow, maw-like chamber of brick and
fire clay with a depressed floor for the molten iron to lie in and a
small square door at the end. It is heated to inferno by a cataract of
flame rising from a fire pit at one side and sucked by draught across
the roof of its mouth. When the whole interior is like a dragon’s
gullet, white hot, wicked and devouring, cold pigs of iron are cast in,
the door is banged to, the chinks are stopped and the puddler gathers
up his strength.
In the door is a small round hole. Through that hole the puddler
watches. When the iron is fluid his work begins. The thing he
represents is Satan raking hell. With his beater and working only
through that little round hole, he must stir, whip, knead and skim the
iron. The impurities drain away in a lava stream beneath the door. He
may not pause. The beater gets too hot to hold, or begins itself to
melt. He casts it into a vat of water and continues with another.
The puddler is the baker, the pastry cook, the mighty chef. All that
follows, the whole pudding, the quality of the iron to the end of its
life, will be the test of his skill and daemonic impatience.
Presently the iron begins to bubble gravely, turning viscous. Now the
art begins. The puddler, still working through that small hole with a
long, round bar, must ball the iron. That is, he must divide the molten
mass into equal parts and make each part a ball of two hundred weight
just. Having made the balls he must keep them rolling round without
touching. If they do not roll they will cool a little on the under side
and burn on top; and if they touch they will fuse together and his work
is lost. One by one he draws them near the door. They must not all
come done at once. Therefore this one takes the hottest place; that
one stays a little back. Then one is ready. The door jerks open. A
helper, working tongs swung by a chain to a monorail overhead, reaches
in, plucks out the indicated flaming pill, rushes it headlong to the
hammermen and comes running back to get another.
The puddling process fascinated Breakspeare. He watched it for a long
time. He particularly enjoyed watching the work of a certain young
puddler, tall and lithe, in whose movements there was an extraordinary
fulness of power, skill and unconscious grace. He was bare to his
middle, wore a skull cap and gloves, and in his outline, turning
always in three dimensions, a quality was realized that belongs to
pure sculpture. He moved in space as if it were a buoyant element,
like water. Never did he make a sudden start or stop. No gesture was
angular. One action flowed into another in a continuous pattern. When
with the furnace freshly loaded, the door closed, the chinks all
stopped and the draught roaring, the moment came to rest he flung
himself headlong but lightly on a plank bench and lay there on his
side, his head in his hand, propped from the elbow. And when he rose it
was all at once without effort.
Standing in deep shadow, outside the area of action, Breakspeare was
not aware that the puddler had once looked at him or knew of his
presence there; and he was startled when without any warning at all
that person departed from his orbit, came close to him, and shouted in
a friendly voice:
“Well, how about it?”
“Bully,” Breakspeare shouted back at him.
They looked at each other, smiling.
“Don’t let the old man catch you,” said the puddler. “He’s about due.”
“All right,” said Breakspeare.
The puddler went back to his work and never looked at him again.
Breakspeare liked the encounter. He liked the puddler, whose
friendliness was in character with his movements, swift and unerring.
He was at the same time in a curious way disappointed. When the puddler
spoke he was a man, like any other, who made the same sounds and had
the same difficulty in overriding the uproar. Speaking was the single
act that visibly required effort of him. But as a puddler, with the
glare in his face, an ironic twist on his lips, his body glistening
with perspiration, his left leg advanced and bent at the knee and
his other far extended, every muscle in him running like quicksilver
under satin,--then he was a demon, colossal, superb, unique. When he
spoke that impression was ruined; when he returned to his work it was
restored.
These were not Breakspeare’s reflections. They were his feelings, and
so engrossed him that he was unaware of being no longer alone in the
shadow. Enoch Gib stood close beside him watching the puddlers. The
puddlers knew the old man was there. One sensed their knowing it from
an increase in the tension of the work. But they did not look at him.
Breakspeare turned as if to move away.
“Stay where you are,” said Gib, in a voice that pierced the uproar. He
seemed to do this with no effort. It was in the pitch of his voice.
When he had seen the end of the heat and the iron was out he added:
“Come with me.”
They walked out side by side through the front gate, across the road to
the little brick office building, into the front room. The old man took
off his coat, hung it on the back of his chair, spread a towel over it,
and sat down at a double walnut desk the top of which was littered with
ragged books, unopened letters, scraps of metals, sections of railroad
iron, scientific journals, cigar ashes and little models of machinery,
in the utmost confusion. Breakspeare, unasked, sat himself down at the
other side of the desk and waited. He had a feeling that all the time
Gib had been expecting him to break and run and was prepared to detain
him forcibly. Why, he could not imagine. He knew nothing about the
sacredness of iron working premises nor of the suspicion with which
intruders were regarded.
“What were you doing in the mill?” Gib asked, brutally.
“Looking at it,” said the young man.
“Who sent you?”
“Nobody.”
“How did you get in?”
“Walked in.”
“At what gate?”
“On the other side.”
Gib made mental note of that statement. Then he asked:
“Who are you?”
“John Breakspeare.”
Gib had been regarding the young man in a malevolent manner. That
expression seemed to freeze. Then slowly he averted his face. His gaze
fixed itself on a burnt cigar hanging over the edge of the desk. He sat
perfectly still, as if rigid, and Breakspeare could hear the ticking of
a watch in his waistcoat pocket.
“What do you want?” he asked in a loud voice, as if they were in the
mill.
Until that instant Breakspeare had no definite thought of wanting
anything in this place. First had been that reaction to the throb of
the engine. Then came the impulse to visit the mill. That impulse
was unexamined. It had not occurred to him to think that anything
might come of it; he had not thought of meeting Gib. Nevertheless the
question as it was asked started a purpose in his mind.
“I want to learn the iron business,” he said.
“Here?” said Gib, quickly.
“Isn’t this a good place to learn it?” the young man retorted.
For a long time the old man sat in meditation.
“The iron business,” he said. “Mind now, you said the iron business.”
“Yes.”
“Not the steel business.... Iron! Iron!”
“I don’t know the difference,” said Breakspeare, adding: “Anyhow, you
don’t teach the steel business here, do you?”
The old man looked at him heavily. Then he got up to pace the floor.
Once, with his face to the wall, he laughed in a mirthless way. That
seemed to clear his mind.
“Come Thursday at eight,” he said.