[Frontispiece: "THAT IS WHERE IT HAPPENED" (See p. 85)]
WEB OF STEEL
By
CYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY
Author of "The Chalice of Courage," "The Island of Surprise," etc.,
and
CYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY, JR.
Civil Engineer
ILLUSTRATED BY THE KINNEYS
NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO
Fleming H. Revell Company
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
Copyright, 1916, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY,
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 17 N. Wabash Ave.
Toronto: 25 Richmond St., W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
To
MYRA
Daughter--Wife
PREFACE
"Web of Steel," as those who read will see, is a book for men, about
men, and written by men.* The authorship is placed in the plural
advisedly. The book is a real collaboration. In the minds of the
writers there is a further pleasant association in the fact that it
is a book about a father and son by a father and son, although no one
must identify the writers with the characters in the story because of
that relationship.
* Yet with true masculine inconsistency it is dedicated to a woman!
It is said that the success of a book, like the success of almost
everything else that man at least undertakes, depends upon women;
that women buy, read, discuss, and promote a novel, and if the book
has no appeal to women it is forever doomed. The authors have at
least proved themselves men of courage, the publishers likewise, for
it cannot be too insistently set forth that this is primarily a book
for men. The authors hope that even with that expressed limitation
it may nevertheless appeal to women in some measure, especially those
who would fain enjoy--the authors are careful not to say
usurp!--masculine place and function. Let no one imagine, either,
the authors hasten to assure those who may honor them by reading this
preface, that there are no women in the book. On the contrary the
fortunes of at least one of the men and the fate of the other are
woven around the eternal feminine whom the authors have striven to
make as feminine and charming, as appealing and delightful, as their
large experience with the other sex permits and warrants!
For the rest, whatever may be said of the fiction the authors rest
confident in the engineering. Again let there be no misapprehension,
this is a novel not a treatise; who runs may read, if he does not run
too fast, and no scientific course is necessary for the comprehension
of the story. The authors disavow any intention of picturing any
engineers alive or dead, or any particular bridge or dam, in any
particular locality. The whole thing is a work of the imagination
except the calculations of the engineer, which are exact when not
empiric!
The book is the result of genuine co-operation and accommodation.
Father and son contended together in affection, albeit sometimes
rather sharply, as to what should go in and what should come out.
They are happy to have arrived at a substantial agreement which,
while it satisfied neither author completely, yet produced a
harmonious and consecutive story, with neither too much nor too
little of the personality of either inserted or withdrawn to mar its
symmetry. Now let all mankind read!
CYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY, _Father_;
CYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY, _Son_.
THE HEMLOCKS, PARK HILL,
_Yonkers, N. Y._
CONTENTS
I
_BRIDGE_
I. Love of Woman
II. The Other Passions of the Engineer
III. The Witness for the Defense
IV. The Portage Through the Dust
V. Fall and Revelation
VI. They Cross the Bridge Together
VII. The Colonel Makes Conditions
VIII. The Lovers Make Pictures on Paper and Heart
II
_C_-10-_R_
IX. The Deflection in the Member
X. The Son of His Father Indeed
XI. The Death Message on the Wire
XII. The Failure
XIII. The Woman's Choice
XIV. For the Honor of the Son
XV. For the Honor of the Father
XVI. The Unaccepted Renunciation
XVII. That Which Lay Between
III
_DAM_
XVIII. Picket Wire and Kicking Horse
XIX. The New Rodman
XX. The Valley of Decision
XXI. Marshaling the Evidence
XXII. Working Up
XXIII. The Former and the Latter Rain
XXIV. The Battle
IV
_SPILL-WAY_
XXV. The Ancient Art of Fascination
XXVI. Once More Unto the Work
XXVII. Brute Force or Finesse
XXVIII. The Battle from Above
XXIX. The Victors
XXX. The Testimony of the Dead
XXXI. At Last to the Stars
I
BRIDGE
[Illustration: (Sketch of parts of a cantilever bridge)]
I
LOVE OF WOMAN
If meetings only lived up to their anticipations, life would be a
succession of startling climaxes. It had been some months since
Meade had seen Helen Illingworth. He had dreamed of meeting her
every day and had pictured the meeting differently and more
rapturously after every letter. When Abbott had received a telegram
from Colonel Illingworth stating that he and his party, including his
daughter, would arrive the next day, all the anticipations of months
had been concentrated and Meade had imagined a romantic meeting in
which the longings and desires of the period of separation would all
be summed up in one dramatic moment. As a matter of fact the whole
thing was casual and ordinary to the last degree. It always is.
In the first place, Dr. Severence, a retired physician, who was
vice-president and financial man, and Curtiss, the chief engineer of
the Bridge company, were hard upon Miss Illingworth's heels as she
stepped down from the car to the station platform. He saw her, as it
were, surrounded by prosaic men. None of these men was a possible
rival. Each was old enough to be her father so he could not really
be jealous of them except in so far as he was even jealous of the
wind that kissed her cheek--at least that is the way he put it to
himself. There was a vein of poetry in this engineer, as there is in
every man who achieves in whatever profession, on whatever field of
work he may adventure. Gradgrind does nothing great, he mounts to no
heights, he wins nothing really worth the winning by his worship of
the facts of life.
Meade had no time to indulge his disappointment. He was busy in the
exchange of greetings. The woman he loved got the same welcome and
the same handshake as her father and the other two men. The
common-place conversation is scarcely worth recording. It was not
until big Abbott, who had been belated by some sudden demand of work,
came sweeping down the platform to engage the attention of the men
that the anxious Meade had a moment with the girl herself.
Now Helen Illingworth had also been seeing visions, dreaming dreams
and forecasting possibilities, so that she had been as disappointed
as he. The only real satisfaction that either of them could take in
the situation lay in the fact that the other was there. It was
midsummer and the girl was dressed in some light filmy fabric which
well became her radiant beauty. Meade could look at a bit of
structural steel work and tell you all about it. All that he could
have told you about the dress she wore, was that it was exquisitely
appropriate, and presented an appearance of amazing simplicity for
anyone who had the command of unlimited means for the adornment of
her person. He could have figured out the cost of the most
stupendous structure, but it never occurred to him that with a great
price to a great artist Helen Illingworth had obtained that look of
delightful simplicity. The gown he thought so modest and
inexpensive, really represented the highest reach of the sartorial
art as it is practiced by, and upon, fair womankind. He could not
know that Miss Illingworth had spent æons of time and riches in
proportion, with the assistance of the best dressmaker in New York,
over this very gown, and what was more to the point, for this very
purpose.
Her maid had lifted her eyebrows behind her mistress' back when she
had been bidden to get out this dress for a visit to the wild and
primitive section of the country in which the great International
Bridge was being erected. The woman knew, from what she had heard,
that there was nobody there except engineers, contractors,
supervisors, and workmen, and why all this superb and costly finery
should be wasted on the desert air she could not see. Even her
father, who was ordinarily indifferent to what his daughter wore,
noticed it and commented on it when she appeared.
"I've had the dress now for over a month," responded Helen in answer
to his observation, "and I want to wear it once at least before it
goes out of fashion."
It was not wasted on Meade, she decided, as she caught his rapturous
glance; that is, the details were, but the effect produced was
entirely satisfactory and quite what she had expected. She had never
looked lovelier. She was not a fragile, ethereal woman; quite the
reverse. That was one of ten thousand things Meade liked about her.
She was modern and up-to-date in every good sense of the word. She
could do all those athletic and practical things that modern young
women can do and she could do them well. Was it riding, or swimming,
or golfing, or driving a speed-boat or motor-car, she took them as an
ordinary girl takes bridge or the latest fantastic dance.
Meade was intensely practical and efficient. He could do all of
those things himself and many more and he liked to do them, and that
is one reason why he had been attracted to her; yet not for that
alone did he love her. On that soft summer afternoon she looked as
subtly delicate as every man would at one time or another have the
woman he loves appear, and as far removed from things strenuous as if
in another world! Distance and absence had but intensified the man's
passion. He awoke to a sudden and overwhelming realization that he
had been a fool in that he had utterly failed even in his most ardent
thought to appreciate the true beauty and rare quality of this
wondrous woman.
A wise philosopher has pointed out that humanity may be looked at
from three points of view. There is the real John, there is the John
that John thinks John is, and there is the John the world thinks John
is. Meade felt that he represented all three when he looked at Helen
Illingworth. Amid the emotions which the sight of her inspired in
him, as he answered mechanically the natural and ordinary questions
put to him by the men of the party before Abbott came on the scene
and relieved him of that necessity, came a swift feeling of despair.
He was wearing the rough clothes, flannel shirt, khaki trousers,
heavy shoes and leggings, which were his habitual use at work.
Contrasted with her filmy and delicately colored fabric his well-worn
olive-drab habiliments stood forth hideously. That is, he thought
so, and the contrast somehow seemed typical of the difference between
them as he considered her.
What was he to aspire to such loveliness? In what way did rough,
rude, he measure up to such a graceful and dainty divinity? He was
as humble as true lovers, of the male persuasion, usually are. She
on the contrary was as arrogant as the opposite sex frequently is.
The statement is made from the pre-matrimonial period! Yet, had he
but known it, she was as pleased as he with the appearance of the
beloved.
There was the careless insouciance of conscious power in the bearing
of the engineer which differentiated him from most of the men with
whom she had been thrown in contact during her life--the exceedingly
well-trained, the exceedingly well-groomed young manhood of the
present day. She recalled that even when her friends went for a hard
day in the woods from the big house on the mountain above Martlet
they always seemed to be clothed in outing togs immaculately new.
Obviously the hand of little use with its daintier touch, was not
that appertaining to Meade. He was made for mastery and for manful
work, even as she for, in that dress, softness and sweet attractive
grace. He looked strength and the fact that he was power in
submission, and strength in subordination, and so obviously hers to
command, gave her a delicate thrill; the same sort of thrill the
great engine-driver feels when he lays his hand on the throttle. It
is not only Budge and Toddy who love to see the wheels go 'round.
And everybody wants to set them in motion. She looked covertly upon
him as a lion-draped Omphale might have looked at Hercules, even
though Meade bore no distaff in his hand.
The International Bridge was the biggest thing of the kind the
Martlet Company or any other American structural plant had ever
undertaken. It had been a constant topic of conversation wherever
her father was. She had heard all about it and although, strictly
speaking, the bridge was the work of Meade, Senior, yet she always
identified it with Meade, Junior. There was a feeling in her mind
that it was her bridge and that, through him, she commanded it. She
was a supremely assured and entirely confident young lady, yet as the
sheer and filmy mousseline-de-soie with its garniture of lace even
more delicate was driven by the wind against the rough nondescript
garment of the man by her side she experienced a passing sense of
uneasiness, such as one might conceive the butterfly would feel in
the presence of a steam hammer. Yet Helen Illingworth was not a
butterfly and no more was Bertram Meade a steam hammer, at least not
to her.
They were just two young people desperately in love, neither quite
sure of the other, at least no assurance had been given or asked, and
although the man was thirty and the woman twenty-four they loved just
as if their passions had been born in the first unthinking hours of
youth and maidenhood.
Experience and observation have established the fact that the whorls
on the thumbs of human hands differ in tracery as one star differeth
from another star in glory, and that so far as humanity can draw a
general inference without having observed all the instances, no thumb
is like any other thumb that has ever complemented fingers since Adam
first inspected his pickers and stealers. The Power that can stamp
this infinite variety in the human skin has seen to it that there are
no duplications in human temperaments. Infinite is the variety of
woman while women collectively are as various as that infinity raised
to the _n_th power. The love story of every man and woman differs in
some particular from that of every other man and woman. Again a
sweeping deduction from perhaps inadequate observation. Yet men who
have loved many have observed the variation in specific and
particular instances and such single-hearted experiences as have been
set down for the ruthless scrutiny of the ethic philosopher have
borne out this contention.
But if it be true, as it is generally admitted, that love-making is
individual and different, in one particular various woman changeth
not. At sweet-and-forty given the conditions and the man she will
love just as she might have--or did--at sweet-and-twenty. It well
may be, God knows, that she will love the same way at
sweet-and-sixty. Which is to say that although both the young people
in this veracious romance had passed the period of--shall we say the
Sweet Evelina age?--they were both affected just exactly the way they
would have been affected if she had been eighteen and he twenty-one.
They were as awkward and constrained when left to themselves as if
one had not been all over the world on man's jobs for a decade and
the other had not queened it among the nicest girls of the land for
half as many years. And with thoughts burning, passionate, and words
embarrassingly torrential at hand to give them utterance they only
spoke commonplaces!
"How is the bridge getting along?" asked the girl, repeating her
father's words of a few minutes before, as these two fell behind the
others marching down the long platform, while the maid standing by
the private car with the porter looked curiously after the moving
group and wondered if that grey-green, long-legged, young man was the
reason for the New York gown!
"It's doing splendidly," was the answer, and even with his heart full
of the girl by his side whom he longed to clasp in his arms but did
not even dare touch the hem of her garment, some little enthusiasm
came into his voice. "It is the greatest bridge that was ever
erected," he said.
"How you love it," said the girl.
Did Meade love the bridge? Ah, there could be no doubt as to that.
He had studied its growth hour by hour. As the great steel web rose
grandly from the pier under the hands of the busy workmen and the
arms of the great traveler, his heart expanded with it. He took
pride in it that increased as panel succeeded panel. He had followed
it with even more heart-consuming interest and anxiety when they
began to push the suspended span across the river on the outer end of
the completed cantilever, toward its fellow rising on the other side.
Its obsession of his soul was so strong and so complete, that he
could scarcely tear himself away from it to do necessary work at his
desk.
He lingered about it when the rest of the work-a-day world which was
concerned with it had withdrawn to rest. Frequently late in the
night he had arisen and had left the sheet-iron shack he occupied
near the work (for the topography of the land and the course of the
river had determined the location of the bridge far from any town),
and had stood staring, fascinated, by its dim mysterious outline,
high upraised against the stars, until its details were lost in the
blackness overhead. Or were it moonlight, he had gazed bewitched by
the great web of steel, all its mighty tracery delicately silvered,
faintly outlined, lace-like, lofty, lifted high into the heavens.
He fell into a little reverie for a brief moment from which she
recalled him.
"Well?" she asked.
Was there a little wistful, jealous note in her voice? He looked at
her quickly as one essays a swift glance at the sun and then averted
his eyes, and from the same cause. She blinded him. He really felt
that he could not look at her continuously without declaring his
passion before the whole world. There was much of the feudal
champion in him. The civil engineer is the last survivor of the type
in this modern and prosaic work-a-day world anyway. Nothing would
have pleased him better than to have seized her before everybody,
then and there, crushing that filmy gown against his rougher
clothing, and to have borne her triumphantly away. Knight errant or
cave man? There are points of similarity between them of which the
world is perhaps not aware. He was ready to fill both roles, and
counted himself unlucky in that there were no dragons present,
although on occasion Colonel Illingworth might have essayed that part
with some success.
"Yes, naturally," he found himself saying in a conventional tone of
voice, "it means a great deal to me. My father----"
"Oh, your father," she began indifferently, although she knew and
liked the great engineer.
"It is his crowning work and----"
"Your beginning."
"It is not in me, or in any engineer, to begin where my father left
off," he said, "but in some way it is a beginning for me. What
little I have done heretofore----"
"Little?"
"Yes. It isn't really very much. It seems more than it is. Anybody
could have done it."
"Absurd."
"It doesn't amount to very much to me at least," he went on, smiling
at her interruption, but pleased at it. "But this will count a great
deal, because through father's kindness I had some hand----
"I believe you did it all," interrupted the girl.
He broke into sudden laughter and his merriment had that boyish ring
she liked. He seemed to think that was a sufficient answer to that
statement, for he went on quickly.
"How long shall you stay?"
And in spite of himself he could not keep his anxiety out of his
voice.
"I think father's going on to the city some time tomorrow--probably
in the morning."
Meade's face fell.
"So soon as that?"
"I will try to persuade him to stay longer. I've seen lots of
bridges built but never one like the International, and I should
enjoy standing by and watching you work."
"I don't do the work. Abbott does that, and the men, of course."
"Your work is the work that makes possible and profitable the labor
of the others," she persevered. "You plan, you lead, the rest only
follow. By the way, father told me to ask you and Mr. Abbott to dine
with us tonight in the car."
Meade's mood changed into positive gloom.
"I can't," he said dejectedly.
"Have you some other engagement? Are you dining with some other
people more to your fancy?"
"You know there is no one here but Abbott, the foremen, and the
workmen."
"Why not, then?"
"I haven't any clothes, neither has Abbott. We left our dress suits
behind us when we came into the wilderness to work."
"Oh," she laughed. "What difference does that make? Come just as
you are. It will be a relief. I like you that way. I get so tired
of black and white," she went on quickly to prevent him from taking
advantage of her incautious admission.
Happiness came back to his soul at that. He had a half-formed notion
of perpetually preserving these garments that she liked and hanging
them up in his ancestral hall, as men did suits of armor which they
had proved in strife, to which their descendants could point with
pride. Just an old suit of olive drab which she liked the love of
woman can dignify anything in the mind of the man she loves.
The half-formed project died, however: for one thing he had no
ancestral halls.
"Really," he found himself saying, "it's awfully good of you, but I
don't think I should with no garments suited to the occasion. I tell
you what I'll do. I'll motor over to the town"--it lay some
twenty-five or thirty miles away--"and get myself a proper outfit."
"It will take so long and I shall be here only until tomorrow," she
said softly.
"Hang the clothes," said the man, radiant once more in that
admission, "since you will allow it I will come with what I can rake
up. But you'll have to tell me which fork to use and give me expert
advice in those customs of polite society which I have almost
forgotten out here in the wilderness."
"I'll do my best," returned the other. "And after dinner and you
have had your smoke with the men, we will go down and look at the
bridge by moonlight."
"And what will you do meanwhile if I should smoke with the men?"
"I will wait," said the woman with mock humility. "Women always wait
while men smoke unless they smoke themselves, don't they?"
"And you have not learned that?"
"Not yet. It makes me feel dreadfully old-fashioned sometimes, but I
have never even tried a cigarette. I don't wish to."
"I love----" he began, and then stopped amazed at his own hardihood,
fearful of the possible consequences of his almost betrayal.
"You what?" she asked daringly, with another swift glance as swiftly
withdrawn.
"I--I like women who do not smoke," he answered lamely, which was not
at all what he intended to say, but which was nevertheless an
approval of her course. "But if you think that with the possibility
of but a few hours in your society I am going to sit around and smoke
with your father or Abbott or Severence or anybody on earth you are
sadly mistaken. I can smoke with men any time I wish, but I can only
talk to you once in a lifetime."
"It isn't six months since you were at our house."
"Six months! It's a thousand years," he went on, "and I'm going to
take you out on the bridge after dinner. It's great at any time.
It's the most magnificent sight on earth even now, but in the
moonlight--there it is now," he pointed as the little group walked
past the station which had hid the view and the great structure
suddenly was revealed to them.
Unconsciously the engineer used the neuter pronoun for the great
structure which for all its sexlessness had still a being and a life.
It is the habit of man to imbue with personality the thing inanimate
that he loves. Furthermore as love naturally is associated in the
masculine mind with the opposite sex, he generally describes that
genderless thing without life which is nearest his heart as "she."
Witness the sailor and the ship, the railroader and the train, the
chauffeur and the car. The bridge engineer is the exception to the
rule. The great structures which he flings from pier to pier, which
he stretches from bank to bank, which lift themselves above rivers
and mountain gorges and arms of the sea, are always neuter. "It" is
the proper pronoun.
The four men ahead had stopped and stood silent. There was something
awe-inspiring and tremendous about the great, black, out-reaching,
far-extending arms of steel. The first sight of it always gave the
beholder a little shock. It was so huge, so massive, so grandly
majestic, and withal so airy seen against the impressive background
of deep gorge and palisaded wall and far-off mountains. So
ether-borne was it in its perfect proportion that even dull and
stupid people--and none of these were that--felt its overpowering
presence. Meade and the girl stopped, too. After one glance at the
bridge she looked at him. And that was typical. For the first time
he was not at the moment aware of, or immediately responsive to, her
glance. And that too was typical. She noted this with a pang of
jealousy.
"You love the bridge," she said softly.
He straightened up and threw his head back and looked at her.
"I thought so," he said simply,--"until today, but now"--he stopped
again.
"But now?" she asked.
"I have just learned what love really is and the lesson has not been
taught me by the bridge," he answered directly.
II
THE OTHER PASSIONS OF THE ENGINEER.
Yet Bertram Meade, the younger, did truly love the bridge which he
had seen grow from the placing of the first shoe--the great steel
base on top of the pier which carries the whole structure--to the
completion of the soaring cantilever reaching out to meet its
companion on the other side. Meade, Junior, although he had turned
his thirtieth year, was indeed young for the position of Resident
Engineer, in the interests of his father the designer, of such a
bridge as the great International, which was to be the tie that
bound, with web of steel, two great countries which lay breast to
breast; already in touch save for the mighty river that flowed
between them.
By no means would Meade, the younger, have been charged with the
great responsibilities of the Bridge had it not been for two things,
neither of which would have warranted his employment in that position
by the Martlet Bridge Company, but which taken together induced them
to give him a trial. The first was his exhaustive preparation and
wide experience. No one had ever started in a life profession with
better equipment than Bertram Meade. To a thorough technical
training at Harvard in the Lawrence Scientific School, had been added
a substantial record of achievement. A fine bridge which he had
erected in faraway Burma, triumphantly achieving the design despite
all sorts of difficulties, had attracted the attention of old Colonel
Illingworth, the President of the Martlet Bridge Company.
He had kept the young man under his eye for a long time. When he
commissioned his father, Bertram Meade, Senior, to prepare the plans
for the great International, the most sought for and famous of
bridges, he had noted with satisfaction that the older man, who stood
first among the bridge engineers on the continent, had associated
with himself his son. Meade, Junior, had recently returned from
South America, where he had again shown his mettle. The two worked
together in the preparation of the designs for what was to be the
crown and triumph of the older man's life, the most stupendous of all
the cantilever bridges in the world.
Indeed there was almost as much sentiment as science entering into
the designing in the great engineer's soul. After the completion of
the International he intended to retire from the active exercise of
his profession. If he could withdraw with the consciousness that he
had linked together two great peoples and that through the arteries
of trade which ran across his bridge their hearts would beat in
greater harmony, he would consider that the end had crowned all his
work.
He had a high idea of his only son's ability. He was willing to
proclaim it, to maintain it, and defend it against all comers except
himself. When the two wills clashed he recognized but one way, his
own. The relations between the two were lovely but not ideal. There
was leadership not partnership, direction rather than co-operation.
The knowledge and experience of the boy--for so he loved to call
him--were of course nothing compared to those of his father. When,
in discussing moot points, the younger man had been unconvinced by
the calculations of the elder, he had been laughed to scorn in a
good-natured way. His carefully-set-forth objections, even in
serious matters, had been overborne generally, and by triumphant
calculations of his own the father had re-enforced himself in his
conclusions; and the more strongly because of the opposition.
Young Meade's position was rather anomalous anyway. He had no direct
supervision of the construction. He was there as resident engineer
representing his father. He had welcomed the position because it
gave him an opportunity to see from the very beginning the erection
of what was to be the greatest cantilever bridge the feet of the
world had ever trod upon, the wheels of the world had ever rolled
across.
He had followed with the utmost care, constantly reporting the
progress to his father, every step taken under the superintendence of
Abbott, a man of great practical ability as an erector, but of much
less capacity as a scientific designer or office engineer. Meade had
watched its daily growth with the closest attention. Like every
other man in similar case, the work had got into his blood. It had
become a part of his life. He watched it when he was in its
presence, he listened for it when in the office and out of sight.
The rat-tat-tat of the pneumatic riveters was music to him. Even the
greater harmonies of the wind which blew ceaselessly through the deep
gorge where the river ran two hundred feet below, diapasoned through
his very brain.
In any mood or under any sky he liked it, even when the rains fell
upon it and the winds screamed about it standing indifferent to both
assaults. But perhaps it appealed to him most at twilight when the
hardness and harshness of all the rigid lines of metal, still to be
seen plainly in their completeness, were softened in the veiling
obscurity of the half light, glowing palely red on the western hills.
Then the bridge, poised upon its great pier with its gigantic arm
extended over the water dark from the withdrawn sun flowing swiftly
beneath, was most beautiful to him.
Yes, Bertram Meade loved the bridge; yet more he loved Helen
Illingworth. Should the comparative be used? Right-minded men love
many things. Even though they love honor and fame and opportunity
and labor and persistence and achievement, they also love their kind;
the aged parent, the loyal friend, the happy child. And some love
sorrow and some love laughter, but all love woman.
Sometimes there is strife between these various passions. Happy the
man who can enfold all the others within his heart without forfeiting
or lessening his love for woman. Bertram Meade was that sort of man.
He never troubled himself to decide among conflicting claims. They
did not conflict. He loved the bridge as he loved his father; and as
he loved Helen Illingworth primarily, there was no incompatibility of
appeals in this trio of affection.
Sometimes, in fantastic moods, the younger Meade wondered if the
bridge in some strange way could feel what it was to him, if it could
know that it was more to him than to any man on earth. To Abbott it
was a big job, to his father it was the crowning achievement of a
lifetime of designing. To Meade, Junior, it was life itself.
Because he had somehow decided that as the completion of the
International meant much to his father, so also should it mean much
to him. For on the day on which it stood finished and triumphant he
would venture to ask Helen Illingworth that question which had
trembled on his lips a hundred times since he had known her. Until
that day he would keep silent.
After the woman, the young man almost idolized his father.
Motherless from birth, the older man was all the family the younger
had. His father's greatness had impressed itself upon him even
before he was old enough to know what greatness was, or in what
particular his father could lay claim to it. Nor was the older man
so engrossed in his profession, as is often the case with greatness,
as to neglect the smaller things in life. The young wife of the
elder Meade, new-made a mother, died in childbirth and that made a
great difference to the boy. Remorseful and repentant Meade was
careful to make the boy his companion, by way of reparation at first
and later because it was joy and its own reward to him. The two were
thrown together the more by the untoward disappearance of the woman.
The childish admiration of the lad developed into an adoration of his
father. When he grew up to be an engineer himself, on more than one
occasion he was brought in contact with his father's work and he was
able to appreciate its characteristic fineness, its superb solidity,
the scientific mastery of the technique of the profession which it
indicated. Perhaps his devotion to his father and to his profession,
in which his aim had been to be worthy of the older man's great
reputation, to live up to it, had so obsessed his mind that hitherto
the attraction of womankind had not been very great.
Bertram Meade had enjoyed minor affairs of the heart, as have most
young men, but they were ephemeral and evanescent until he met Helen
Illingworth. He had taken her in to dinner in her father's house on
his first visit to Martlet as the emissary of his own father about
the plans of the bridge. It was summer and the Illingworths chose to
pass a portion of it in the great big house on the mountain, the top
of one of the peaks of the Allegheny range, where Colonel Illingworth
could get down to the bridge works in the valley without difficulty
if there was need.
Young Meade's life had been a roving one. He had met women all over
the world, but he had never spent much of his time in social America
and this was the first splendid American girl, gloriously
representative of her class, with whom he had come into any intimate
contact. He fell in love with her out of hand and although he
scarcely dared to dream it--his experience had not made him very bold
where such women as she were concerned--he did not fall alone.
There was back of Meade a solid record of substantial achievement in
far countries and among strange peoples, where he had been confronted
by unknown demands and beset by mysterious dangers. Straight and
bronzed and tall and confident enough, except when he looked at her,
with the assurance that comes from achievement, and with strength
mental as well as physical written all over him, Meade was the modern
representative of the ancient guild of soldiers of fortune. He
looked at life as the knight-errant of other days who faced the world
lordly a-horseback and laid it under tribute of his sword and spear,
and to whom the service of woman was the highest duty, the greatest
privilege, the supremest pleasure.
Meade was the means of communication between his father and her
father. He was often at Martlet that summer. He met her in the city
in the winter. He followed her for a brief visit to the South. The
next summer found everything settled but a proposal on his part, and
an acceptance upon hers. Proposals bear the same relation to love
affairs that prefaces do to books. They seem to come first, but in
reality they are the last things said or written. And for the time
to speak or write he waited for the bridge, she for him.
Indeed Helen Illingworth had been very much vexed at her somewhat
restrained lover. She resented it that a man who had been a
construction engineer at home and abroad, could possibly be timid
even before a woman. When he had not spoken the fateful words at
their last meeting she could scarcely veil her disappointment from
him. She made no effort to conceal it from herself. And when the
engineer came to think of what had happened he cursed himself for a
fool, because he had not put everything to the touch. Yet he felt
the proper hesitation in which a man should always approach a woman,
especially if he craves success. He was not sure of her. It might
be that she would say no. The fall of the bridge could hardly have
dismayed him more than that possibility. And it was after all better
to wait until he had done his work and could point to his not
inconsiderable share in it before he did speak. In his ignorance of
the feminine heart he half fancied such an achievement might plead
for him! He knew not that he needed it not.
So with father, bridge, and woman in his heart--the last as usual
being first--Bertram Meade was very much a lover as he stood on the
temporary siding and watched the engine drawing the special train, to
the end of which was attached her father's private car, rolling down
the track toward the bridge for a summertime excursion under the
guise of an inspection tour.
If anybody could have weighed in a balance his respective passions,
as he stood there by her side confronting the bridge, he would have
discovered that for once at least father and bridge together were
flying high into the air, uplifted by the power of a greater, a more
natural and a final passion.
After all in the long run it is a woman, even though scarcely more
than a stranger, who will win over the greatest bridge or the finest
parent the world may know--especially in the case of a young man!
III
THE WITNESS FOR THE DEFENSE
One of the pleasantest evidences of the possession of riches is in
the luxury of a private car. Although Colonel Illingworth was
personally a man of simple tastes as became an old campaigner, there
was no appointment that wit could devise or that money could buy
which was lacking to make his private car either more comfortable or
more luxurious. Colonel Illingworth did not take large parties with
him on the "Martlet," for so he had named the car. Indeed the two
men and his daughter, with the cook or steward and the porter and the
lady's maid, about exhausted the capacities of the car, so that there
was an unusually large observation room at the end.
Anything that partook of luxury and refinement would have been of
deep interest to Meade and Abbott, who had been removed from both for
a long time on the work. But in its napery, glass, china, and
silver, that dining table needed not to apologize to any other
anywhere. The Colonel was most punctilious in dressing his part and
although he willingly condoned the fact that neither Meade nor Abbott
had brought evening clothes to the camp, he and his guests were
arrayed to fit the table.
As for his daughter, she had put on her very best. The rude hand of
mere man could not hold pencil sufficiently delicate to describe her
radiant apparel. Meade, who sat nearest her, could not do it, albeit
he never took his eyes off her if he could help it. Neither could
the other men who looked at her so admiringly, even though one of
these was her father and the other two were well and, considering the
years and sizes of their several consorts, fatly married!
Again the French maid had lifted her brows surreptitiously when this
gown had been ordered extracted from its wrappings and protecting
tissues. She did not lift them quite so high however, because now
with the sharpness of her sex and trade, she knew why Mademoiselle's
best had been taken on the train and donned on this occasion. It was
for the engineer who sat by her side at the table in the observation
room.
If anything had been needed to reduce this said engineer to a
condition of helpless impotency and despair it was this new gown.
Some women's clothes wear the women, and others women wear! This is
an orphic way of saying that some women clothes make, while others
make the clothes. Oh, not by hand, not by any deft stitchery, but by
personality. It was always difficult for mere man to describe one of
Helen Illingworth's gowns, only an observing, and unprejudiced, woman
could do that.
Of course every wise man knows, in spite of vehement assertion to the
contrary, that as a rule women dress for other women, not for men.
That claim that they dress for men is usually urged to placate the
bill-payer and absolve the feminine conscience, but it is not true,
that is generally speaking. In this instance, it was. There was no
woman to be dazzled by Helen Illingworth's apparel in that car unless
it was Celeste, the maid. No man is a hero to his valet, eke no
woman a heroine to her maid. She did not usually care greatly about
any impressions she made on Celeste, although the vivacious,
enthusiastic expressions of approval she aroused in her factotum that
night were balm to her soul. She wanted somebody to tell her how
well she looked; not from vanity but as a forecast of the impression
she would probably make on her engineer.
It had taken him little time to make his toilet. He rejoiced in a
business suit, new and from the best tailor. He was a fastidious man
in such matters, and it fitted him and became him amazingly. Abbott
was dressed likewise. They were both scrubbed to within an inch of
their lives, but climbing about the bridge their hands were
scratched, roughened, stained, and torn. Aside from that, Meade was
certainly most presentable, and old Abbott, in spite of his
indifference to such matters, looked the able and powerful man he was.
The conversation at dinner was at first light and frivolous.
"I'm lost," began Abbott, "overpowered with all this silver and glass
and china."
"Yes," laughed Meade, "we should have brought along our granite ware
and tin cups, then we would be free from the dreadful fear that we
are going to drop something or break something."
"You can break anything you like," said the Colonel with heavy
pleasantry. "Make hash out of the china and cut glass," he went on
with a delightful mixture of metaphors, "so long as the bridge
stands."
"And that is going to be forever, isn't it, Mr. Meade?" asked the
girl quickly.
"I don't think anything built by man will survive quite that long,"
he answered as much to her father and the others as to her, "but this
gives every promise of lasting its time."
"You know," observed Curtiss, "there was some question in my mind
about these big compression members. When I first studied your
father's drawings I wondered if he had made the lacing strong enough
to hold the webs."
"That matter was very thoroughly gone into," said Meade quickly. "It
was the very point which I myself had questioned, but father is
absolutely confident that we provided latticing enough to take up all
the stresses. I looked into that matter myself," he went on with
much emphasis.
"I guess it's all right," said Curtiss lightly. "I examined the webs
and lacings carefully this afternoon. They seem to be as right as
possible."
"Those trusses," said Abbott emphatically, "will stand forever. You
need not worry about that."
"Are you going to finish this job on time?" asked Severence, the
vice-president. "You know the financial end of it is mine, and much
depends upon the date of completion."
"That depends upon you people at the shop, Doctor. If you get the
stuff here to me I'll get it in place in short order," answered
Abbott.
"There's an immense amount of work still to be done on the bridge,
though," said Curtiss, "and you can't let up a minute if we are to
complete it within the limits assigned."
"I don't expect to let up a minute. If necessary I'll get more men
and work them in two shifts, or even three. Don't worry about that,
gentlemen."
"We aren't worrying about anything with you and Meade on the job,
Abbott," said the Colonel genially.
"Yes, you are, father," said the girl, "begging your pardon, you live
bridge, and think bridge, and sleep bridge, and eat bridge, and drink
bridge."
"Mercy," laughed the Colonel. "I must have a digestion that is a
cross between that of an elephant and an ostrich. I'm glad I don't
play it, too."
"You know what I mean," said his daughter. "Ever since the
International has been started you have scarcely been able to give a
thought even to me. I'm tired of it. I hope the old thing will soon
be finished so that we can all go back to normal life again."
"I hope so, too," assented the Colonel, "and I guess you are right.
The fact is the bridge is an obsession with us all. It is the
biggest job the Martlet has ever handled. Indeed it is the biggest
thing in the world. It's the longest cantilever, the greatest span,
the heaviest trusses, the----"
"I've heard all about it," interrupted the girl, waving him into
silence, "ever since you began it. Sometimes I think it's beginning
to obsess me, too."
"You don't look like it," whispered Meade, under cover of the general
laugh that greeted her remark.
"What do I look like?" she whispered back quickly in return.
But Meade had no opportunity to tell her save in so far as his eyes
spoke for him because as the laughter died away the Colonel took up
the conversation. That silent language which the young engineer
spoke with his eyes, however, must have been quite intelligible and
easy for her to understand. Her color was already high, but in the
excitement of his glance in an indefinable anticipation of something,
she could not exactly tell what, it deepened a little under that
direct almost fierce glance.
"It is not exactly a subject for dinner conversation," said the
Colonel with sudden gravity, which proved how keenly his daughter had
realized his overpowering interest in the great undertaking, "but all
of us here, even you, my dear, must realize how much that bridge
means to us. I won't go so far as to say that its failure would ruin
us, but it would be a blow both to our finances and our fame that it
would be hard for us to survive."
"Have you ever known anything that my father designed to fail?" asked
Meade somewhat hotly.
"No, and that is why we took his plan in spite of----"
"In spite of what, sir?"
"In spite of Curtiss here and some others."
"Mr. Curtiss," said Meade, turning to the chief engineer, "if it will
add anything to your peace of mind I will assume my full share of
responsibility for the matter. You know the books by
Schmidt-Chemnitz the great German bridge engineer?"
Curtiss nodded.
"At first, I, that is we, thought that there might possibly be
weakness in those compression members, but I checked them with the
methods he advocates and then submitted the figures to my father and
then he went through the whole calculation and applied coefficients
he felt to be safe."
"I'm willing to take your father's judgment in the matter rather than
Schmidt-Chemnitz', or anybody's," said Curtiss, "so successful has
been his career."
"Now that I have seen the members in place I have no doubt that they
will stand," said the Colonel.
"Sure they will," added Abbott with supreme and contagious
confidence, an assurance which helped even Meade to believe.
"Of course we all know," said Dr. Severence, who had been long enough
in touch with engineering to learn much about it, "that there is
always more or less of experimenting in the design of a new thing
like this."
"Yes," said the Colonel, "but we don't want our experiments to fail
in this instance."
"They won't," said the young man boldly.
He had long since persuaded himself that he had been all wrong and
his father all right, so that he entered upon his defense and the
defense of the bridge with enthusiasm. He was ready to break a lance
with anybody on its behalf.
"Well," began the Colonel, "we have every confidence in your father
and in you. I don't mind telling you, Meade, it need not go any
further, that when this bridge is completed we shall be prepared to
make you personally a very advantageous offer for future relations
with the Martlet Company if you care to accept it. On the strength
of your probable acceptance we are already planning to venture into
certain foreign fields which we have hitherto not felt it to our
interest to enter."
"That is most kind of you, Colonel Illingworth," said the young man
gratefully, "and it appeals to me very strongly. I have been
associated with father latterly. He wants to retire with the
completion of this bridge and before I open any office of my own I
should like the advantage of further experience. Such a connection
as you propose seems to me to be ideal, from my point of view. No
man could have any better backing than the Martlet Bridge Company."
"Well, we shall look to you to be worthy of it," said the Colonel
kindly.