James Polder conducted them to the river, sweeping away in a wide curve
beneath solid grey stone bridges into a region of towering hills. They
turned to the left, and, walking on a high embankment, passed blocks of
individually pretentious dwellings, edifices of carved granite,
alternating with the simpler brick faces of an older period. A narrow,
whitely dusty sweep of green park was followed by a speedy degeneration
of the riverside; the houses shrunk to rows of wood marked by the grime
of steel mills. Soon after they reached a forbidding fence; and, passing
a watchman's inspection, entered into a clamorous region of sheds,
tracks and confusing levels such as Howat Penny had viewed from the
train.
"I'm in the open hearth," Polder told them, leading the way over a
narrow boardwalk, still skirting the broad expanse of the river. "It's a
process, really, but the whole mill is called after it. We make steel
from iron scrap; that's our specialty in the Medial Works; and our
stuff's as good as the best. The bigger concerns mostly use pig. Turn in
here." They were facing the towering end of an iron shed, and mounted a
steep ascent to gain the upper entrance. The multiplication of noises
beat in an increasing volume about Howat Penny. Below him a locomotive
screeched with a freight of slag; beyond was a heap of massive, broken
moulds; and a train of small trucks held empty iron boxes beside an
enormous bank of iron scrap dominated by a huge crane swinging a
circular magnet that dispassionately picked up ton loads and bore them
to the waiting cars.
Inside he gazed through a long vista under a roof lost in tenebrious
shadow. On one side were ranged the furnaces, a continuous bank of brick
bound in iron; each furnace with five doors, closed with black slides in
which a round opening emitted an intolerable, dazzling white glare. But
few men, Howat thought, were visible in proportion to the magnitude of
the work; deliberately engaged, with leather shields hanging from their
wrists and blue spectacles pushed up on their grimy brows.
A crane advanced with the shrill racket of an electric gong, its
operator caged in midair, and herculean grappling chains swinging. A
grinding truck, filling the width of floor, moved forward to where Howat
stood. It was, Polder told him, the charging machine. An iron beam
projected opposite the furnace doors, and it was locked into one of the
charging boxes, filled with scrap metal, standing on the rails against
the furnaces. A man behind him dragged forward a lever, the slide which
covered a door rose ponderously on a blinding, incandescent core, and
the beam thrust forward into the blaze, turning round and round in the
emptying of the box. It was withdrawn, the slide dropped, and the
machine retreated, its complex movements controlled by a single engineer
at crackling switches where the power leaped in points of light like
violets.
At another furnace, an opened door, where the heat poured out in a
constricting blast, workmen were shovelling in powdery white stone;
moving up with their heads averted, and quickly retreating with
shielding arms. "That's dolomite," James Polder's explanations went
rapidly forward. "They are banking up the furnace. The other, in the
bins, is ferro manganese." He procured a pair of spectacles; and, with a
protected gaze, Howat looked into a furnace, an appalling space of
apparently bubbling milk over which played sheets of ignited gases. The
skin on his forehead shrivelled like scorching paper.
"I particularly wanted you to see a heat tapped," Polder told Mariana.
"And they're making a test at number four." They followed him to where a
small ladle of metal had been dipped out of a furnace. It was poured,
with a red-gold shower of sparks, into a mould, then dropped in a trough
of water. The miniature ingot, broken under the wide sweep of a sledge,
was examined by a lean, grizzled workman--"the melter"--who nodded. "We
must get back of the furnace," Polder continued, indicating a narrow
opening between brick walls through the unstopped chinks of which
seethed the scorifying blaze.
Howat Penny stood at a railing, looking down into an apparent confusion
of slag and cars, pits and gigantic ladles and upright moulds set upon
circular bases. A crane rumbled forward, grappled a hundred-ton ladle, a
fabulous iron pot, and petulantly deposited it under a channel extending
out from the base of the furnace where they had been stationed. A
workman steadied himself below their level and picked with a long iron
bar at a plugged opening. It was, James Polder went on, the most
dangerous moment of the process--"sometimes the furnace blows out." The
labour of tapping was prolonged until Howat was conscious of an
oppressive tension. Workmen had gathered, waiting, in the pit. More
appeared along the railing above. This was, he felt, the supreme, the
dramatic, height of steel making. The men suddenly seemed puny,
insignificant, before the stupendous, volcanic energy they had evoked.
The tapping stopped. Polder commenced, "It will be rammed out from the
front--"
A stunning white flare filled the far roof with a dazzling illumination;
and, in a dull explosion, a terrific billowing of heat, a cataract of
liquid steel burst out through lambent orange and blue flames. It
poured, searing the vision, into the ladle, over which rosy clouds
accumulated in a bank drifting through the great space of the shed.
Nothing, Howat thought, could contain, control, the appalling expansion,
the furious volume, of seething white metal. He was obliged to turn
away, blinded by sheets of complementary green hanging before his eyes.
The uproar subsided, the flooding steel became bluer, a solid stream
curving into the black depths of the ladle. Vapours of green and sulphur
and lilac shivered into the denser ruby smoke and rising silver spray.
Polder called a warning into Mariana's ear, they drew back as a lump of
coal was heaved up from the pit, into the ladle. A dull vermilion blaze
followed, and Howat Penny partly heard an explanation--"recarburizing."
He could now see the steel bubbling up to the rim of the container. Men,
Polder said shortly, had fallen in.... Utterly unthinkable. With a
sudorific heat that drove them still farther back the slag boiling on
the steel flowed in a gold cascade over a great lip into a second
receptacle below. That was soon filled, and gorgeous streams and pools
widened across the riven ground. The steel itself escaped in a milky
incandescence. "A wild heat," James Polder told them, pleased. "The
bottom of a furnace may drop out. I was almost caught in the pit at
Cambria." The crane chains swung forward, picked up the ladle of molten
metal, and shifted it through the air to a position over a circular
group of moulds. There, a valve opened, the steel poured into a central
pipe. "Bottom-filled," Polder concluded, assisting Mariana over the
precarious flooring; "the metal rises into the ingot forms."
They descended again, by the blackened brick, box-like office of the
superintendent, to the level of the pit, retraced the way over the
boardwalk. They passed a cavernous interior, filled with a continuous
crashing, where a great sheet of flushing steel was propelled over a
system of rollers through a black, dripping compression. "I can take you
to the Senate," James Polder told them, once more outside; "or the
Engineers' Society. Dinner will be ready at the club."
He conducted them into the serious interior of a large, solidly
constructed dwelling that had been transformed into a club. The dining
room was already filling but they secured a small table against the
wall. Across the floor ten or twelve men were gathered in a circle.
Some, Howat thought, were surprisingly young for the evident authority
in their manner, pronouncements; others were grey, weatherworn, men with
immobile faces often lost, in the middle of a gay period, in a sudden
gravity of thought, silent calculation. He saw the smooth, deft hands of
draughtsmen, and scarred, powerful hands that, like James Polder's, had
laboured through apprenticeship in pit and mill shop.
He recognized that Polder was more drawn than he had first observed. He
was sapped by the crushing entity of the steel works, the enormous heat
and energy and strain of the open hearth. If the younger did not lay off
he would, unquestionably, break. Nevertheless, Howat was totally
unprepared for the amazing suggestion quietly advanced by Mariana.
"Jimmy," she said, "couldn't you come to Shadrach for those two weeks?
You'd find the quiet there wonderful. And any doctor will advise you to
leave your family for a proper rest. I'm certain Howat would be as nice
as possible."
A sudden, patent longing leaped to James Polder's countenance. Actually
he stuttered with a surprised delight. Damn it, there was nothing for
him, Howat, to do but stare like a helpless idiot. He ought to say
something, second Mariana's impudent invitation, at once. She ignored
him, gazing intently at the younger man. He, too, meeting Mariana's
eyes, had apparently totally forgot the unimportant presence of Howat
Penny. And he had been married to his Harriet for a scant half year!
Howat Penny thought mechanically of the Polders' depressing house, the
odours of old cooking and cheap cigarettes, the feverish yapping of the
silky animal, Cherette, with matted, pinkish eyes. The precipitant,
prideful, young fool! Why hadn't he held onto the merest memory, the
most distant chance in the world, of Mariana, rather than fling himself,
his injured self-opinion, into this stew?
"Don't say it can't be managed," she persisted. "Anything may. It's
absolutely necessary; you can get a prescription--two weeks of green
valley and robins and country eggs. Howat will take your money from you
at penny sniff, and I'll--I'll come out for dinner."
"Harriet thought of going back to the family," he replied; "but it
might--" he turned at last to Howat Penny. "Would you have me?" he asked
directly. What, in thunder, choice of reply did he have? Howat couldn't
point out the shamelessness of such an arrangement. Harriet, it seemed,
was not to be considered; just as if she were a merely disinterested
connection. He issued a belated period to the effect that Shadrach was
spacious and Rudolph a capable attendant. It was, he saw, sufficient.
"We can write," said Mariana. She endeavoured to caress Howat's hand,
but he indignantly frustrated her.
"I'll have to get back to the hearth," James Polder announced
regretfully. "It's been wonderful," he told Mariana Jannan. Howat
scraped his chair at the baldness of Polder's pleasure. "Your work is
tremendous, Jim," she replied; "the only stirring thing I have ever
known in a particularly silly world. But you mustn't let it run you,
too, into steel rails. President Polder," she smiled brilliantly at him.
"Why not?" queried James, the sanguine, at once defiant, haggard and
intense.