requiem of great girders, struts, and ties smiting other members and
ringing in the ears of the helpless men like doom. Then, with a
fearful crash, with a mighty shiver, the landward half collapsed on
the low shore, like a house of cards upon which has been laid the
weight of a massive hand. The river section, carrying the greater
load at the top and torn from its base, plunged, like an avalanche of
steel, two hundred feet down into the river, throwing far ahead of
it, as from a giant catapult, the traveler on the outward end of the
suspended span and a locomotive on the floor beneath.
Wilchings, and the few men safe on the shore, stood trembling,
looking at the bare pier head, at the awful tangled mass of wreckage
on the shore between the pier and the bank; floor beam and stringer,
girder and strut, bent, twisted, broken in ragged and horrible ruin,
while the water, deeper than the chasm it had cut, rolled its waves
smoothly over the agitations of the great plunge beyond the pier.
They stared sick and faint at the tangled, interwoven mass of steel,
ribboning in every direction--for in the main the rivets held so it
was not any defect of joints, but structural weakness in the body of
the members that had brought it down--and inclosing as in a net many
bodies that a few seconds before had been living men.
They had seen body after body hurled through the air from the outward
end and, as they gazed fearfully in horror here and there dark
figures floated to the surface of the water. They caught glimpses of
white, dead faces as the mighty current rolled them under and swept
them on. And no sound came from the hundred and fifty who had gone
down with the bridge. The two-hundred foot fall would have killed
them without the smashing and battering and crashing of the great
girders that had fallen upon them or driven them from the floor and
hurled them, crushed and broken, into the river.
They stared across the crumpled ruin between them and the pier and
out beyond the now frightfully bare stretch of water to the
uncompleted truss still rising grandly on the other side and the very
contrast between its mass and strength and splendor emphasized the
frightful, awe-inspiring nakedness of the battered pier before them.
Yes, Meade had been right. Abbott had one swift flash of
acknowledgment, one swift moment packed with such regrets as might
fill a lifetime--an eternity in a Hell of Remorse--before he, like
the rest, had gone down with the bridge!
XIII
THE WOMAN'S CHOICE
The message was received in ghastly silence. The blood ran cold in
the veins as the people in the room took in the awful disaster. No
one spoke for a moment, none moved. They had all been shocked into
insensibility. Colonel Illingworth's face had lost its pallor. It
was fiery red as if gorged with blood. Bertram Meade was whiter than
any other man in the room. He was thinking of his father. What an
end to such a career! One failure to outweigh a thousand successes.
The girl moved first. Her father and the young engineer were the two
men in whom she was most interested, the two who were most deeply
touched. They were both in agony, both in need of her. To which
would she go? Unhesitatingly she stepped to the side of the younger.
For this cause shall a woman leave her father and her mother! And
never believe but that the father saw and understood even in the
midst of his suffering. Youth thinks not, but fathers always know.
Helen Illingworth laid her hand on Meade's arm. She pressed close to
his side. Together they confronted the older man. She had chosen.
"We are ruined," gasped the Colonel, tugging at his collar. "It's
not so much the financial loss, although we put millions into that
bridge, which now is only good for the scrap heap. We could stand
that--but our reputation! We'll never get another contract. I might
as well close the works. And it is your father's fault. It's up to
him. He was the greatest bridge engineer on this continent. He
revised our design. He changed it in accordance with his knowledge
and experience and he gave us column formulas of his own. The blood
of those men is upon his head. Well, sir, I'll let the whole world
know how grossly incompetent he is, how----"
"Sir," said young Meade, standing very erect and whiter than ever,
since the hour had come to take the blame, "the fault is mine. I
made the calculations. I checked and rechecked them. Nobody could
know with absolute certainty the ability of the lower chord members
to resist compression. But whatever the fault, it is mine. My
father had absolutely nothing to do with it. He is----"
"He's got to bear the responsibility," cried the Colonel
passionately. "It has his name----"
"No, I tell you," thundered the younger man. "For I'll proclaim my
own responsibility. You knew that I had much to do with it. You
said at the time that you were playing in great luck because you got
not only the experience of my father, but the knowledge and the
latest methods of his son, for one figure. Now the fault is all mine
and I'll publish the fact from one end of the world to the other."
"It's a load I wouldn't want to have on my conscience," said Colonel
Illingworth.
"The ruin of a great establishment like the Martlet," added Dr.
Severence.
"The dishonor to American engineering," said Curtiss.
"And the awful loss of life," continued the Colonel.
"I assume them all," protested the young man, forcing his lips to
speak, although the cumulative burdens set forth so clearly and so
mercilessly bade fair to crush him.
"It was only a mistake," protested Helen Illingworth, drawing closer
to her lover's side, and with difficulty resisting a temptation to
clasp him in her arms.
"A mistake!" exclaimed her father bitterly.
"You said yourself," urged the woman, turning to the chief engineer,
"that you didn't know whether the designs would work out, that nobody
could know, but you were convinced that they would."
"I did," admitted Curtiss.
"Under the circumstances, then," said the girl, "I stand by----"
"Wait," interrupted the father. "Meade, there is one consequence you
have got to bear that you haven't thought of."
"What is that?"
"Helen."
"What do you mean?"
"Do you think I'd let my daughter marry a man who had ruined me, an
incompetent engineer by his own confession, a----"
"It is just," said Meade. "I have nothing further to do here,
gentlemen. I must go to my father."
"Just or not," cried Helen Illingworth, "I can't allow you to dispose
of me in that way, father. If he is as blamable as he says he is,
and as you say he is, now is the time above all others for the woman
who loves him to stand by him."
"Miss Illingworth, you don't know what you are saying," said Meade,
forcing himself into a cold formality he did not feel. "I am
disgraced, shamed. There is nothing in life for me. My chosen
profession--my reputation--everything is gone."
"The more need you have for me, then."
"It is noble of you. I shall love you forever, but----"
He turned resolutely away and walked doggedly out of the room. Helen
Illingworth made a step to follow him.
"Helen," interposed her father, catching her almost roughly by the
arm in his anger and resentment, "if you go out of this door after
that man, I'll never speak to you again."
"Father, I love you. I'm sorry for you. I would do anything for you
but this. You have your friends. That man, yonder, has nothing,
nothing but me. I must go to him."
She turned and went out of the room without a backward look or
another word, no one detaining her. Now it happened that by hurrying
down the hill in the station wagon, which he had bidden wait for him,
Bertram Meade had just caught a local train, which made connections
with the Reading Express some twenty miles away, and Helen
Illingworth in her dog-cart reached the station platform just in time
to see it depart. She thought quickly and remembered that ten miles
across the country another railroad ran and if she drove hard she
could possibly catch a train which would land her in Jersey City a
few minutes before the train her lover caught.
She ran to the telephone and called for her own car in a hurry. She
jumped into it a few minutes later and told the chauffeur that she
wanted to catch the next express on the Pennsylvania Road. The news
of the fall of the bridge was already abroad in the town. The man
had heard how Meade had taken the blame, and had caught the local by
furious driving. He had heard how Miss Illingworth had followed. It
had become known, through her maid, that Meade and the president's
daughter were engaged. The chauffeur scented a romance at once. And
he drove the car as he had never driven before.
The girl caught the express and reached Manhattan Junction on time.
In this case there was no delay. She had decided _en route_ that it
would be impossible for her to get from the Pennsylvania station to
the Reading station in Jersey City in time to intercept her lover in
the short margin of time at her disposal and she had determined upon
a course of action. She would ride to the Hudson Terminal in the
city and then go first to the office of Bertram Meade, Senior. If he
were not there she would go to his residence. She had visited both
places before, and she was certain that she would find both Meades at
one place or the other.
The newsboys on the street were already crying the loss of the
bridge. She saw the story displayed in lurid red headlines as she
sprang into the taxi and bade the chauffeur hurry her to the Uplift
Building further downtown. The bill she handed him in advance made
him recklessly break the speed-limit, too.
XIV
FOR THE HONOR OF THE SON
Bertram Meade, Senior, had not left the office during the whole long
afternoon. The stunning force of his son's utterly unexpected
announcement had wrecked the father as surely as the defective member
would wreck the bridge. The boy might delude himself with the
youthful hope that something could be done to save it, but the old
man knew that the bridge was doomed and he realized that his own ruin
in professional fame would follow its downfall.
He sat alone in his office quietly waiting for the end, not as one
awaiting a death sentence, but rather as one who had been tried,
convicted, and sentenced might await the moment of execution. As to
the drowning, in the brief interval preceding the final asphyxia,
life unrolls in rapid review, so pictures of the past took form and
shape in his mind. He recalled many failures. No success is
uninterrupted and unbroken. The little stones of progress are
planted on the recurrent hills of mistake. It is through constant
blundering that we arrive. "Roses, roses all the way" generally ends
in the gibbet. He had learned to achieve by failing as everybody
else learns. But failures and mistakes, which were pardonable in the
beginning of his career, could not be condoned now; those should have
taught him. He realized too late that his later achievement had
begot in him a kind of conviction of omniscience, a belief in his own
infallibility, bad for a man. His pride had gone before, hard upon
approached the fall. He had been so sure of himself that even when
the possibility that he might be mistaken had been pointed out and
even argued, he had laughed it to scorn. His son's arguments he had
held lightly on account of his youth and comparative inexperience--to
his sorrow he realized it, too late.
Again came that strange feeling of pride, the only thing which could
in any way alleviate his misery or lighten his despair. It was his
own son who had pointed out the possible defect. Youth more often
than not disregards the counsel of age. In this case age had made
light of the warnings of youth. It was a strange reversal he
thought, grimly recognizing a touch of sardonic and terrible humor in
the situation.
Of course in that swift survey of his career which he was making, he
counted success after success, cumulating in magnitude and greatness.
Not easily, not lightly, had he risen to the chief place in his
profession. Verily his path to the stars had been through
difficulties, as well as failure, and yet he recognized bitterly that
no one would ever think of his success again in the face of this one
awful failure. Certain words that he had read in his Bible came to
him and seemed strangely applicable, though here was no question of
moral guilt.
"_When the righteous turneth away from his righteousness and
committeth iniquity--shall he live? All his righteousness that he
hath done shall not be mentioned; in his trespass that he hath
trespassed and in his sin that he hath sinned, in them shall he die._"
He had always rather felt some injustice in the proposition despite
its divine sanction. He had questioned it. He did not question it
now. He knew that when men looked at the finest structure due to his
cunning devising and scientific planning they would say:
"Yes, that's one of Meade's designs. I wonder how long it will
stand. You know he was responsible for the International."
In his case the end would not crown the work. It would destroy it.
He would be remembered as one confounded like the builders of Babel,
the tower by which men overpassed the limit divine.
"Whom the gods destroy they first make mad." Well, he had been mad
enough. If he had only listened to the boy. And now there was
nothing he could do but wait. Yes, as the long hours passed and the
sun declined, and the evening approached, there suddenly flashed upon
him that there was still something he could do. He had experienced
some strange physical sensations during that afternoon, unease in his
breast, some sharp pains about his heart. What did it mean? Was it
mental or physical? He forgot them for the moment in the idea that
had come to him.
When the bridge fell he would avow the whole responsibility, take all
the blame. Fortunately for his plans his son had reduced to writing
his views on the compression members, which had almost taken the form
of protest, and this letter had been handed to his father. His first
mind had been to tear it up after he had read it and had overborne
the objections contained therein, but on second thought he had
carefully filed it away with the original drawings. It was, of
course, in the younger Meade's own handwriting.
He went to his private safe, unlocked it,--and that he was a long
time over the combination might have been indicative of his state,
but he thought of the delay with nothing but vexation--and brought
out the plans. He had intended upon the completion of the bridge to
give the letter back to the young man. He had keenly enjoyed by
anticipation his prospective little triumph when time had proved the
father right, the son wrong. He opened the drawings and found the
letter attached to the sheet of drawings. He put back the other
drawings and closed the safe without locking it. Then he went back
to the desk and considered the document. There were the calculations
of the younger Meade. He was too old and tired to verify them all
and there was no need. The bridge itself was doing that.
But he read the letter over, and in the illumination of the event he
wondered dumbly how he could have failed to see the clearness, the
cogency of the arguments, the finality of the conclusions, even
without the careful computations he could not now follow. He had
been blind, mad. He laid the paper down on his desk and put his hand
to his heart. Yes, that pang must be mental.
We look before and after. Some super-men, perhaps, see more at the
first glance than at the second, but most men, even the great,
comprehend more largely in the afterlook. These papers, when they
were published, with his own comment or admission, would rehabilitate
the younger Meade. They would do more to confirm his own damnation
because it would appear from them that he had been unable even to see
the truth when it was presented to him. Well, he would be condemned
so completely anyway that any addition, or subtraction for that
matter, would scarcely alter the state of affairs.
Of course he would submit those papers to the public at once. Was
there anything else he could do? Yes. He sat down at the desk and
drew a sheet of paper before him and began to write. Slowly,
tremblingly, he persevered, carefully weighing his words before he
traced them on the paper. He had not written very long before the
door of the outer office opened and he heard the sound of soft
footsteps entering the room. He recognized the newcomer. It was old
Shurtliff, a man who had been his private secretary and confidential
clerk for many years. He stopped writing and called to him.
To a wonderful capacity for divining his employer's mind and
completing his often brief and unfinished sentences by an intuition
which was almost uncanny, Shurtliff added a quietness of manner that
would have been annoying to some men, but which was most admirably
complementary to the brisk, brusque, hurried, energetic habit of his
employer and friend, who was all action, who could never draw a plan
even or make a design without leaving it at frequent intervals to
walk up and down the room or to throw up his arms, to get motion and
action into life.
Shurtliff was an old bachelor, gray, thin, tall, reticent. He had
but one passion--Meade, Senior; but one glory--the reputation of the
great engineer. Yes, and as there is no great passion without
jealousy, Shurtliff was filled with womanly jealousy of Bertram Meade
because his father loved him and was proud of him. Shurtliff knew
all about the private affairs of the two engineers, father and son.
He knew all about the protest of the younger Meade. The father had
told him just what he intended to do with it.
Shurtliff's life was bound up in the office. Even holidays and
Sundays found him there for a part of the time at least. He might
not have anything at all to do, indeed his work had been growing
lighter as the older Meade had gradually withdrawn himself from
active practice, but the old secretary was only happy there. He
could breathe more freely and think more pleasantly and live more
contentedly in the office than anywhere else. He had few friends.
None at all who weighed in the balance with the older Meade.
Shurtliff might have been a great man if left to himself or forced to
act for himself. But pursuing a great passion so long as he had he
had merged himself in the more aggressive personality of his employer
and friend. He had received a good engineering education, but had
got into trouble over a failure, a rather bad mistake in his early
career, too big to be rectified, to be forgiven, or condoned. The
older Meade had taken him up, had been kind to him, had offered to
try to put him on his feet again, but Shurtliff had grown to love the
temporary work in which he had been engaged and he had no wish for
anything else.
His big failure had increased his natural timidity, so he stayed on.
He had become a part of the old man's life. As years went by the
secretary came to realize that he could never be anything else. The
ambitions of youth were abandoned. He no longer dreamed dreams or
saw visions. Well, why not? He was absolutely alone in the world.
Meade had dealt generously with his humble coadjutor; Shurtliff
reasoned, perhaps, that he had as much from life as was coming to
him; his church, his modest club, the charities and benefactions he
loved to indulge in, assurance for his old age, and Meade himself.
What could such a man as he ask more?
It has been said that he was jealous of the younger Meade; not
meanly, not unpleasantly jealous, more resentful perhaps at the
relative amount of affection the god of his idolatry bestowed upon
him. He knew that he had to take second place and that he ought to
take second place, and that if he failed to do so it would have been
a reflection upon the character of the man whose personality and fame
were dearer to him than anything else. Yet he did not enjoy that
position.
Young Meade had never been able to get very far into the personality
of Shurtliff, but he liked him and respected him. He realized the
man's devotion to his father and he understood and admired him.
Aside from that jealousy the old man could not but like the young
one. He was too like his father for Shurtliff to dislike him. The
secretary wished him well, he wanted to see him a great engineer. Of
course he could never be the engineer that his father was. That
would not be in the power of man. But still, even if he never
attained that height, he could yet rise very high. Shurtliff would
not admit that there was anything on earth to equal Meade, Senior.
In his dry, quiet way he had laughed with the older man over the
presumption in the younger man's protest and argument. Oh, not in
the presence of the younger man of course, but he had thoroughly
enjoyed it. He was waiting for the time to come for the return of
the protest. Meade, Senior, who had accepted all this devotion
without hesitation and perhaps without fully understanding it, had
told him that as he had heard the protest and argument he should be
present when it was returned. Shurtliff's own engineering skill was
not sufficient, since it had only been kept up by association as a
secretary to the elder man, not in active practice, to enable him to
pass judgment on the point himself.
The secretary was greatly surprised that afternoon as he stopped
beside his own desk in his little private office, partitioned from
the outer room, to hear his name called from the inner office. He
recognized his employer's voice, of course, yet there was a strange
note in it which somehow gave him a sense of uneasiness. He went
into the room at once and stopped aghast.
"Good God, Mr. Meade!" he exclaimed.
Ordinarily he was the quietest and most undemonstrative of men.
There was something soft and subtle about his movements. An
exclamation of that kind had hardly escaped him in the thirty years
of their association. He checked himself instantly, but Meade,
Senior, understood that something of his own mental turmoil, the
agony inward and spiritual, must have appeared in the outward and
visible. He did not doubt his face told the story. The completeness
of the revelation and the terrible nature of the story he could not
guess. The day before Shurtliff had left Meade a hale, hearty,
vigorous, somewhat ruddy man. Now he found his employer old, white,
trembling, stricken. Meade looked at Shurtliff with a lack-luster
eye and with a face that was dead while it was yet alive.
"Mr. Meade," began the secretary a second time, "what is the matter?"
"The International Bridge," answered the other, and the secretary
noticed the strangeness of his voice more and more.
"Yes, sir, what about it?"
"It's about to collapse. Perhaps it has failed already."
"Collapse? Impossible!"
Meade passed his hand over his brow and then brought it down heavily
on the desk.
"As we sit here, maybe, it is falling," he added somberly in a sort
of dull, impersonal way.
Into the mind of the secretary came a foolish old line: "London
bridge is falling down, falling down!" He must be mad or Meade must
be mad.
"I can't believe it, sir. Why?"
"There's a deflection in one of the lower chord members of one and
three-quarters inches. It's bound to collapse. The boy was right,
Shurtliff," explained Meade.
"That can't be, sir," cried out the secretary with startling energy.
He would not allow even the idol itself to say that its feet were of
clay.
"It can and is. He was right and I was wrong. I am ruined."
"Don't say that, sir. You have never failed in anything. There must
be some means."
"Shurtliff, you ought to know there is no power on earth could save
that member. It's only a question of time when it will fail."
"But young Mr. Meade?"
"He telegraphed me last night--this morning. I didn't get the wire.
He couldn't make telephone connections, so he came down on the night
train. Abbott refuses to take the men off the bridge unless he gets
orders from Martlet. We tried to get in touch with them. At last he
went down himself. I am expecting a wire every minute. If the
bridge will only stand until quitting time the men will all be off,
and there won't be any lives lost, but if not----"
The secretary leaned back against the door-jamb, put his hand over
his face, and shook like a leaf. The old man eyed him.
"Don't take it so hard," he said. "It's not your fault, you know."
"Mr. Meade," burst out the other man, "you don't know what it means
to me. A failure myself, I have gloried in you. I--you have been
everything to me, sir. I can't stand it."
"I know," said Meade kindly. He rose and walked over to the man,
laid his hand on his shoulder, took his other hand in his own. "It
hurts more, perhaps, to lose your confidence in me than it would to
lose the confidence of the world."
"I haven't lost any confidence, sir. We all make mistakes. I made
one, you know, and you took me up."
"It's too late for anybody to take me up. Men can't make mistakes at
my age. No more of that. We have still one thing to do."