John’s Wall Street disaster was personal. He assumed all liabilities.
Therefore it did not involve his partners, save that he owed Slaymaker
and Pick nearly half a million dollars on his notes. Nor did it touch
Thane and Agnes. He took good care of that.
On the day of his return to Pittsburgh he had dinner with them. They
had moved again, to a house of their own, one they had built on an
unspoiled eminence among some fine old trees. They exhibited it with
the pride of children. It was large and expensively made, with an
unpretentious air, and one of its features, saved until the last, was
an apartment for John. They hardly expected him to adopt it. However,
it should be his always, just like that, whenever it might please him
to come, and it had pleased them to do it.
The evening meal was no longer supper. It was dinner. Thane at last was
comfortable in the society of servants, even in the brooding, anonymous
presence of a butler.
Agnes now was in full bloom. Life had touched her in its richest
mood. There were moments in which her aura seemed luminous, like a
halo; or was that a trick of John’s imagination? He had not seen her
for above a year. She was more at ease with him than she had ever
been, spontaneous, friendly, quite unreserved, and by the same sign
infinitely further away. There was no misunderstanding her way with
Thane nor Thane’s with her. They had achieved the consonance of two
principles. They were the two aspects of one thing, separate and
inseparable, like right and left, like diameter and circumference.
What one thought the other said; what one said the other thought. They
conversed without words.
Agnes pressed John with questions about the Wall Street episode. They
had read a good deal about it in the newspapers. His narrative left
much to be vaguely imagined.
“But you yourself--how did you come out?” she asked. “Nobody else
appears to have got hurt. What happened to you?” For on that point he
had been evasive.
“I did get rubbed a bit,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I’m all
right.”
She looked at him thoughtfully.
“Tell him what we’ve been doing,” she said, turning to Thane.
“Remember,” said Thane, “you said once we’d see ore go in at the top of
a blast furnace and come out rails at the other end of the mill without
stopping?”
“Yes,” said John, sitting up.
“That gave me an idea,” Thane continued. “We’ve done it. It’s
experimental yet but we can do it. Take the steel ingots straight out
of the soaking pit and put them through the rolls with no reheating.”
“Does anybody know it?” John asked.
“Just ourselves,” said Thane.
Agnes took it up there, described the process in detail, and told how
Thane had evolved it through endless nights of trial and failure.
John was amazed at the extent and accuracy of her knowledge. Thane
anticipated his question.
“She knows,” he said. “She could run a mill.”
It was literally true. John was thrilled to hear how at night, in
cap and overalls, she had been going with Thane to the mill to watch
his experiments. Not only did she learn to understand them; she
could discuss them technically, and make helpful suggestions. She
had taken up the study of metallurgy in a serious way. She spent her
days digesting scientific papers in English, French and German and
was continually bringing new knowledge to Thane’s attention. Later to
her immense delight she saw phases of this knowledge translate itself
through Thane’s hands into practice at the mill.
“It’s in the blood,” said John, bound with admiration.
It was a cherishable evening. After dinner they sat on the veranda.
Below them was a bottomless sea of velvety blackness, with no horizon,
no feeling of solid beneath it, sprinkled at random with lights and
intermittently torn by flashes from blast furnaces and converters many
miles away.
“It’s like looking at the sky upside down,” said Agnes.
They could feel what was taking place off there in the lamp-black
darkness. Men were tormenting the elements, parting iron from his
natural affinities, giving him in new marriage without love or consent,
audaciously creating what God had forgotten--_steel! steel! steel!_
There in that smutted deep were tools walking about like fabled
monsters, obedient and docile, handling flaming ingots of metal with
the ponderous ease and precision of elephants moving logs. There amid
clangor and confusion shrieking little bipeds were raising gigantic
ominous shapes from shapelessness. There an epic was forming.
These three sitting on the veranda were definitely related to all of
this. It had never ceased to thrill them. Much of it they had imagined
before it was there. Some of those Leviathan tools were Thane’s own.
He was thinking of them, not boastfully, yet with a swelling sense of
having created them. They were his ectoplasm, his arms and legs and
sinews externalized in other forms. Seldom did he review his work,
being normally too much absorbed in the difficulty at hand. Now, as
he gave way to it, a tingle of satisfaction stole through his blood.
It made him wish to touch Agnes. His hand reached for hers and it was
near. She seemed to know what he was thinking.
John was thinking of the steel age, of what it yet required, of its
still unimagined possibilities. Every railroad then existing would
have to be rebuilt with heavier rails and bridges. Cars would come to
be made of steel. Street railways were a new thing: they would take
immense quantities of steel.
They had been silent for a long time.
“That’s the Agnes plant ... way over there ... that blue flame. There!”
said Thane.
“I had made it out,” said John.
“What did you call it?” Agnes asked.
Sheepishly they told her that from the beginning, for luck, they had
called it the Agnes plant.
“How nice!” she said.
From that their conversation became more personal, even reminiscent.
They found they could speak naturally of incidents always until
then taboo. They talked of Enoch, of their arrival and beginning in
Pittsburgh, of the mill at Damascus which was doing well, and of each
other, how they had changed and what it was like to be all grown up.
When Agnes rose to leave she shook hands with John, saying: “Alexander
will give you the key. We don’t press you. But it’s there for you
whenever you have the impulse to come. Day or night. Any time. And even
if you never come it will please us to keep it always ready for you.”
With that she was gone, so suddenly that John had been unable to get
any words together. He had not even said good-night.
“That place we’ve fixed for you means something,” said Thane, lunging
out of a silence. “I can’t find any way to say it. We know how it was
when you brought us to Pittsburgh and how there wasn’t any job for us
until you bought the little nail mill. We know all about it. It’s lucky
for all of us,--lucky for Agnes and me, I mean,--I didn’t know enough
to see it then. There ain’t no way to say how we feel about it. You
can just understand that’s what this key means.”
John took it, turned it over in his hand, then put it in his pocket and
said nothing.
“The reason Agnes was asking you so close how you came out in Wall
Street,” Thane added, “was we thought you might-a got skinned. We’ve
got a lot of money. We think it’s a lot. And we want you to know--”
“Don’t!” said John. “That’s enough. Now stop it. Stop it, I tell you.”
“A-l-l right, a-l-l right,” said Thane. “I’m through. I ain’t a going
on, am I? I’ve got it all said.”
“I’m going,” said John. “Walk down to the gate.”
At the gate they shook hands and lingered.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” said John. “There’s nothing you two--what I
mean--”
“I know, I know,” said Thane.
“You don’t know anything,” said John. “Let me say something. I owe
you a damn sight more than you owe me. I couldn’t have done anything
without you. You’re the axle tree. I’m only the wheel. This one new
wrinkle, if it proves out, is worth millions.”
“Well, don’t lose that key,” said Thane.
They shook hands again and pushed each other roughly away.