father and I have undertaken to put this bridge across and we have to
do it. Our honor is pledged. I'll think more of that bridge now
since its completion means you. And every blow of riveter or hammer,
every grinding of steel on steel, every creak of winches, will say to
me, '_Hurry up, old man, hurry up; your girl is waiting for you when
the great spans are completed and the river is crossed._' What an
inspiration that will be for me."
"I was interested in the bridge, before," said the woman, "but think
how I shall watch it now. You must write me every day and tell me
every inch that you have gained."
"Trust me, I'll measure it in millimeters."
"And now, sweet love, good-night," she whispered.
"I shall see you in the morning?"
"If father attempts to run this train away without letting me see you
again he will have to leave me behind," she laughed as she looked
back at him through the door.
Meade did not want to leave the car. He would fain stand on the
platform near it all night long. It was completely dark except for
her stateroom, where trickles of light came from around the
close-drawn curtains. He did wait until that room was dark also
before he went to his shack, which was built on the high land so that
it faced the bridge. He could see it from the window. He lay there
watching it, that bridge in which was bound up his love, his life,
his fortune.
VIII
THE LOVERS MAKE PICTURES ON PAPER AND HEART
The next morning bright and early--adjectives that refer not only to
the morning, but to the man and, as we shall see, to the woman--Meade
hurried down the platform he had traversed late and slowly because he
was leaving her the night before. The men were not yet called to
work, they had not had their breakfasts even. The sun had just
risen. He did not expect to see anyone at that hour at the private
car toward which he stepped softly, he just wanted to be there so he
could be near the woman whom, in spite of the fact that they were
separated by the steel and glass walls of the car, he still could
feel in his arms.
We all know the proverb about the early bird and the worm. It seems
almost ungallant even to think it in this instance, but Bertram Meade
certainly caught Helen Illingworth because he was on hand at the
break of day. She too had been moved to early rising, for as he
stopped abreast of the car she came from the door and stood surprised
and, like Aurora, rosy with the dawn, especially in cheeks, if an
adjective so common as rosy may be applied to the flush of color that
flamed beneath her sensitive skin as she saw him and came down to him.
He had not expected to see her and she had not expected to see him,
and it was necessary for both of them to make elaborate explanations
each to the other of this indubitable fact. Explanations are said to
be dangerous; not, however, is that true when they are sandwiched
between kisses. If you rise early enough, that is before anybody
else, you may kiss unobserved by the world; and if you do it softly,
even while you stand under the open window of a car behind the
curtain of which a father nods, you may do it with impunity.
When a brief period of sanity ensued--"I came out to see the bridge,"
said the girl.
"I had a sweeter object in view than any structures of stone and
steel."
"Knowing man as I do, I infer----" began the woman archly.
"Your deductive powers, like yourself, are beyond praise," he
interrupted.
"Some lady in the field?" she concluded.
"In the car."
"But you couldn't see me," she began, with dismay well assumed.
"In my mind's eye I can see nothing else, not even the bridge. When
I look at that bridge the sound of your voice speaks to me in every
whisper of the wind through the steel. I can hear the swish of the
silk of your dress, the grind of the slipping gusset as I did last
night. I can recall the beating of your heart as I caught you and we
stood rocking on the very edge. It would not have been such a bad
death after all," he continued, "for we would have gone down together
and the last beat of each heart would have been against the last beat
of the other."
The woman looked at him. The gay badinage with which they had begun
suddenly seemed inappropriate.
"It's better to live together," she said softly, "even than to die
together."
"Yes, of course. But I am not sure of----"
"Me?"
"Of myself. I don't see how such happiness can come to me. I've
done nothing to deserve it."
"You're making the bridge."
"A man might make a million bridges and not be worthy of one woman
like you."
"I told you last night that to hear you say that, even though it is
not true and I know it isn't----" she went on, stopping his protest
with her hand lightly touching his lips.
"I didn't make it half strong enough," he interposed, kissing her
fingers.
"It was worth all the risk and I don't know why you have any fears.
I belong to you now. If it hadn't been for you I shouldn't have been
here at all. My life is yours by right of conquest."
"Only for that?" cried the man.
"And by my heart's gift as well," she added softly.
"Oh," said Meade, "I can't understand it. It's beyond me."
He looked at her, fresh, white, sweet, cool, lovely, and then at
himself, rough, rugged, stark, strong. Now Helen Illingworth was not
fragile or delicate, but one of the charms of woman is that if she
wills she can easily look that which she is not, on occasion. He
knew that she was a strong, vigorous young woman, yet it pleased him
to think of her then as a flower, spirituelle, daintily dependent.
She looked the part and she acted it too, because she divined his
wish.
She laid her hand on his arm. The light pressure which thrilled him
telegraphed dependence, abandonment, trust, through the fibers of his
being to his very soul. He looked down at her hand. It was not the
smallest thing on earth. It was the firm hand of the splendid woman.
It fell upon his arm lightly, not with the delicate touch of the hand
of little use, but with a pressure of beautiful proportion and
womanly tenderness.
Yet it seemed to him smaller than he imagined a woman's hand could be
and the hand with which he clasped hers appeared huge and rough
indeed. And it seemed so to her, too, his hand that is, yet the
qualities that he deprecated in his own hands were those that she
admired. She, too, was conscious of the difference between her
fleecy lightness and his severe strength.
They walked up and down the platform between the bridge and the car,
her hand still on his arm. By no mental process whatsoever could one
conclude that she really needed support or that he actually gave it,
yet both agreed on those points. Love, like Gratiano, speaketh an
infinite deal of nothing, but unlike the Venetian the conversers
treasure the lightest word. They were both to live on the
remembrance of the glorious trivialities, from the world's point of
view, of last night and that morning. Yes, they were destined to
live on those, far, far longer than they dreamed.
So pacing up and down they came at last to stop beside the car.
There were signs of life about it. They passed by it to the
observation platform. Meade climbed up, opened the gate, let down
the step, and helped his lady-love up. She invited him to breakfast,
preparations for which were already under way. He had not thought
about it and neither had she, although they were both possessed of
healthy appetites, but it was an excuse for a further exchange of the
limitless variety of trifles which make up the secret and beloved
part of our most cherished recollections.
They sat together in the camp chairs talking and gazing their full.
No ideas were ever so wonderful to her as his; nor to him, as hers.
They had begun to plan their future on the completion of the bridge.
They would go abroad when they were married. He had been everywhere
and seen everything, and so had she, but now they would see them
together. It would be quite different. Life would begin with the
completion of the bridge.
A pencil and a piece of paper lay on the little table which had been
left on the platform the night before. So still had been the summer
night that the paper had not been disturbed by breeze or human hand.
When Helen Illingworth rose to press the electric button to summon an
attendant Meade picked up the scrap and--by what chance who knew,
since he had not taken his eyes from her throughout the long morning,
not even when she told him to look at the bridge--he glanced down at
the paper. She turned to find him looking at it with wrinkled brow.
"What is this?" he asked.
"What is what?" she returned with a little jealousy, for it was the
first moment of attention he had given to anything but to her.
He held it up to her. She saw a curious little sketch on the paper
made with some care so as to show four huge webs of steel connected
at the top and bottom by lacings of steel angles.
"It looks like part of the bridge," she announced with a glance
downward.
"It is a part of the bridge," he said promptly. "It is one of the
big compression members of the lower chord of the truss."
There Was a little trouble in his face of which she was dimly
conscious, yet it was not sufficient to call for comment.
"Mr. Abbott and Mr. Curtiss were talking about it yesterday evening.
Mr. Curtiss said something about its design that I happened to
overhear. One of them must have drawn it. Mr. Abbott probably. I
came out on the platform just before you came to dinner. Mr. Abbott
was telling Mr. Curtiss it was all right. He seemed to have some
doubt. It is all right, isn't it?"
"Of course, of course," said Meade. "You know it's the member we
were discussing last night."
He picked up the pencil, as is the habit of engineers, and began to
sketch just as Abbott had done the night before. As he talked she
bent over him.
"Why," she said, "you're making a little picture of the bridge,
aren't you?"
He dropped the pencil.
"It's a habit we all have."
She picked up the paper and looked at it carefully.
"Finish it," she said, handing it back to him.
"I'll make you a fine drawing of it when I have more time."
"No, just that. It came by chance just as we came to know that we
loved each other."
"Didn't you know it before?" he went on, taking the pencil and laying
the paper on the table while he worked rapidly.
"I hoped. Didn't you?"
"I never dreamed that such a thing could be possible."
"And I had to fall off a bridge to make you speak, did I, incredibly
stupid man?"
"You did, adorably wise woman," he laughed in glad affirmation.
"It is finished," he said as he handed the rough sketch back to her.
She bent over him, looking at it carefully. With a few bold outlines
and expert strokes he had drawn a different sketch above the strut
Curtiss and Abbott had debated over, the outreaching cantilever with
the suspended span, traveler and everything just as it stood.
"There," he said, pointing with his pencil to the outer end of the
floor, "that is where it happened."
She pressed it to her heart.
"I don't have to do this, it is printed there without this, but I
will just keep the sketch to look at it and think of it when we are
parted."
"Good-morning," said the Colonel, coming out of the door of the car.
II
C-10-R
[Illustration: (sketch of part of a bridge truss)]
IX
THE DEFLECTION IN THE MEMBER
Three days after the departure of the Illingworth party the young
engineer fell ill, very much to his disgust. His indisposition was
not serious, but it took the painful, unpleasant, and debilitating
form of follicular tonsilitis, which is about the meanest small thing
that can lay a strong man low.
The bridge could undoubtedly get along without him, but nevertheless
he fretted over the enforced withdrawal from his constant supervision
of the work. Indeed in the end he had to pay for that very fretting,
for he got up too soon and went out too quickly, and was promptly
forced back to bed again as a consequence of his impatience.
Now, after a week's confinement in his cabin, he felt strong enough
to venture out again and to attack his problems. They were personal
problems now, much more intimate than before, for he was building not
only the bridge but weaving in its web of steel his own future
happiness.
Of course he had been able to get out on the rough porch of the
galvanized iron shack which was his own and which, as has been noted,
had been so placed that he had the bridge in full view and all the
operations on it, and the day before he had even walked unsteadily
down to the river bank, where he had been equally surprised and
delighted at the progress that had been made. Abbott was a driver
after his own heart. Really things seemed to have gone on just as
well without him as if he had been present and, as he phrased it, on
the job. He had not been lonely in his illness, for all of the chief
men connected with the construction had done their best to beguile
the tedium of his hours by visiting him whenever they could spare the
time.
Abbott had been especially kind in his somewhat rough-and-ready way.
The big construction superintendent was fond of Meade, although he
held him in a little--contempt is a harsh word, disdain does not
exactly express it, perhaps to say that he undervalued him would be
best. Anyway, he regarded him more as a theoretical than a practical
man and the inevitable antagonism between the theorist and the
practical man, when they are not combined in one personality, was
latent in Abbott's heart.
The building of a bridge in Burma was not the work of a practical man
according to Abbott's idea. That was almost as ideal and visionary
to the hard-headed veteran constructor as building one in the moon.
Yet Abbott had a sneaking respect for the younger man, and more than
a sneaking liking for him. Nightly, he brought to him details of the
progress of the work. That evening, just before leaving, he remarked
in the most casual manner in the world, as if it were a matter of
little or no importance, that C-10-R was a trifle out of line.
Now C-10-R was the biggest member of the great right-hand truss on
the north side of the river. It consisted of four parallel composite
webs, each formed of several plates of steel riveted together. These
webs were connected across their upper and lower edges by diagonal
latticing made of steel angle bars. C-10-R and its parallel
companion member, C-10-L, in the left-hand truss, carried the entire
weight of the cantilever span to the shoe resting on the pier. These
members were sixty feet long and five feet wide. The webs were over
four feet deep and in size and responsibility the great struts were
the most important of the whole structure.
To say that C-10-R was out of line meant that it had buckled, or
bent, or was springing, and had departed from that rigid
rectangularity and parallelism which was absolutely necessary to
maintain the stability and immobility of the truss and the strength
of the bridge. To the theorist nothing on earth could be more
terribly portentous than such a statement, if it were true. To the
practical man, who, to do him justice, had never dealt with such vast
structures--and he was not singular in that because the bridge was
unique on account of its size--the deflection noted meant little or
nothing.
"Good God!" exclaimed Meade, aflame on the instant with anxious
apprehension. The night was warm and he was dressed in his pajamas
and had been lying on the bed. As if he had been shocked into action
he sat up, forgetful of his weakness. "Deflection!" he fairly
shouted at Abbott, who regarded him with half-amused astonishment,
"in the principal compression member, a camber in C-10-R?" he
continued, using an old technical term for such a deviation from the
straight. "Why didn't you tell me?"
By this time Meade had got his feet into his slippers and was
standing erect.
"It isn't enough to make any difference," answered Abbott quickly,
perhaps a little disdainfully.
"It makes all the difference on earth," cried Meade. "It means the
ruin of the bridge."
He reached for his jacket, hanging at the foot of the bed, and
dragged it on him.
"Don't worry about it, youngster," said Abbott rather contemptuously,
although he meant to be soothing. "I'm going to jack it into line
and--here," he cried as Meade bolted out of the door, "you'd better
not excite yourself that way. Come back to bed, man, and----"
But Meade was out of the house. It was summer and the sun had set,
but the long twilight of the high latitude still lingered. There
would be a moon in an hour or two, but none of its light would show
for a long time; meanwhile a few of the brighter stars had appeared
here and there in the graying light of the evening. Before him rose
the gigantic structure of the bridge. For all its airiness it looked
as substantial as the Rock of Gibraltar, and it looked even more
substantial if possible, as the man, seizing a lantern and forgetting
his weakness and everything, ran down beneath the overarching steel
to the pierhead, climbed up to the shoe, and crawled out on the lower
chord as rapidly as he could.
The genius of the father had been inherited in full measure by the
son. Bertram Meade needed but one glance to see the deflection from
the right line in the important member. For all his years of
inexperience he was a better trained engineer than rough-and-ready
Abbott. What appeared to the latter as a slight deflection, Meade
saw in its true relation. There was a variation in the center of the
member of an inch and a half at least, although unnoticeable to an
untrained eye. It had all come in the last week. They had extended
the suspended span far out beyond the edge of the cantilever and,
with the heavy traveler at the end, the downward pressure on the
great lower chord members had greatly increased.
It was a terribly heavy bridge at best. It had to be to sustain so
long a span, the longest in the world. And the load, continuous and
increasing, had brought about this, to the layman trifling, to the
engineer mighty, bend. If it bent that way under that much of a
load, what would it do when the whole great span was completed and it
had to carry its transitory loads of traffic beside?
Not infrequently man is sensible of the weakness of a plan although
he cannot demonstrate it. _Per contra_ man rests confident in a
conclusion at which he has arrived, although he cannot set forth the
steps to justify it. When two such different views meet it is
natural that age, experience, reputation, and authority shall carry
the day. Although Bertram Meade, Junior, had never been persuaded in
all particulars of the soundness of his father's design, and could
not be persuaded, that vast experience, that great reputation, that
undoubted ability with its long record of brilliant achievement had
at last silenced him. He had accepted through loyalty that which he
could not accept in argument. Once accepted, he acted accordingly,
heartily seconding and carrying out the wishes of the older and, as
the world would say, the abler man.
Now there is something empiric about every great engineering
enterprise, but more especially if it presents a new problem. If
there were not it would not be great. The work of the engineer in
that event would be purely mechanical and devoid of that imaginative
touch which always is a part of true greatness. Inevitably new
stresses are to be provided for and no man can tell, until by the
test of actual experience, whether or not he has absolutely succeeded
in taking up that stress. There is no absolute certitude in empiric
formulæ, because the whole range of conditions on which they are
based is not known or cannot be duplicated by him who applies them.
Finally Meade concluded that, as usual, he had been wrong and the old
man right, and he was glad indeed to be able to come to that
decision. He was led the more easily and inevitably thereto because
of a certain quality that all engineers possess, a habit of mind in
which they all share. When the thing itself is before them
concretely, especially if it looks to be of sufficient bigness, the
invariable tendency of the engineer is to trust it despite previous
calculations. It is there, it stands, it is; though it moves not it
has a being; and the great monster strut, sixty feet long, seemed to
him big enough and rigid enough, if placed on the fulcrum of
Archimedes, to hold up and even to move the world.
The thing that smote the engineer hardest, as Abbott spoke, was that
this weakness was exactly what he had foreseen and pointed out. It
was the possibility of the inability of this great member to carry
the stress that young Meade had deduced by using the formula of
Schmidt-Chemnitz. It was this point, and this point particularly,
that he had dwelt upon with his father and which they had argued to a
finish. So strongly had he been impressed with the possible
structural weakness of this member that he had put himself on record
in writing to his father. The letter he had written had been
destroyed, so he had been informed, but he remembered it perfectly.
The old man had overborne him and now the little curve, one and a
half to one and three-quarter inches in sixty feet, established the
accuracy of his unheeded contention.
Although he could find no fault with his calculations he had decided
he must have failed in some way, since he could not convince his
father; and, in the face of the great experience and ability and the
serene confidence of the old engineer, he had finally yielded the
point. Had it been anyone else he would never have dropped it. He
would have fought it out to the very end. Vainly now he wished he
had not let the old habit of affection and the little touch of awe
with which he regarded his father persuade him against his reason.
Affection and business never did mingle. Sentiment and science?
Yes, they have a relation, but not when it comes to engineering
calculations. Now just because he had given in to his father the old
man would be ruined. The younger Meade's experience was not great
enough to devise ways and means of strengthening the bridge entirely
satisfactorily if the deflection continued. Perhaps no one could do
that. A large part of it might even have to be taken down. The
question would have to be referred to his father at the earliest
possible moment, he reflected, as he noted the deflection. And he
felt a generous pang of sorrow at the humiliation the older man would
certainly feel when his error was proved to him.
Meade realized in a flash that he had been living as it were in a
fool's paradise, lulled by his feeling that his father must be right.
Other things than professional honor and reputation and material
success were involved. When the bridge was completed he was to have
for his wife the woman he loved, so the old Colonel had said. When
the bridge was completed his father was to retire with this last work
as his crown. When the bridge was completed his own career was to
begin. Now! Good God! The pang that shot into his heart was almost
as great as that which touched him when Helen Illingworth fell with
the slipping gusset plate and he only caught her at the last moment.
He stopped, feeling suddenly ill, as a very nervous, high-strung man
may feel under the sudden and unexpected physical demand of a great
shock. The reaction between mental and physical conditions was
immediate and overpowering. He was weak still from the tonsilitis.
He leaned against the diagonal at the end of C-10-R, clinging to it
tightly to keep from falling, and again that strange fit of trembling
he had suffered from on the bridge with Helen Illingworth, for which
he cursed himself as a coward, struck him. Abbott, who had followed
more slowly, stopped by him, somewhat surprised, somewhat amused,
more indignant than both.
"Abbott," said Meade fiercely as the erecting engineer joined him on
the pierhead, "if you put another pound of load on that cantilever I
will not be answerable for the consequences."
"What do you mean?"
"That deflection is nearly two inches deep now and every ounce or
pound of added weight you put upon it will make it greater. Its
limit will be reached mighty soon. If it collapses--" he threw up
his hands--"the whole thing will go."
"Yes, if it collapses, that's true," said Abbott, "but it won't."
"You're mad," said Meade, taking unfortunately the wrong course with
the older man.
"Why, boy," said Abbott, "that bridge will stand as long as creation.
Look at it. That buckle doesn't amount to anything. It is only in
one truss anyway. The corresponding member in the other truss is
perfectly straight."