his horizon. Cryble, he thought contemptuously, a man of routine, had no
more salience than one of the thousands of identical iron pigs run from
Glory Furnace. There commenced now a period of toil more bitter, more
relentless, than his first experience in the valleys; by constant
effort he was able to keep just ahead of the unprofitable labor for
the Columbus Railroad. The number of workmen grew constantly smaller,
vaguely contaminated by the unsettled period, while his necessity
increased. Again and again he longed to strip off his coat and
superfluous linen and join the men working the metal in the hearths; he
would have felt better if he could have had actual part in rolling and
stamping the pig beds, or even in dumping materials into the furnace
stack.
In the fever of Alexander Hulings' impatience and concern, the
manufacture of his iron seemed to require months between the crude ore
and the finished bars and blooms. He detected a growing impotence among
laborers, and told them of it with an unsparing, lashing tongue.
A general hatred of him again flashed into being; but it was still
accompanied by a respect amounting to fear.
He was approached, at a climax of misfortune, by representatives of the
railroad. They sat, their solid faces rimmed in whiskers, and smooth
fingers playing with portentous seals, in his office, while one of their
number expounded their presence.
“It's only reasonable, Hulings,” he stated suavely, “that one man can't
stand up against present conditions. Big concerns all along the coast
have gone to wreck. You are an exceptional man, one we would be glad to
have in our Company; and that, briefly, is what we have come to persuade
you to do—to merge your activities here into the railroad; to get on the
locomotive with us.
“Long ago you were shrewd enough to see that steam transportation
was the coming power; and now—though for the moment we seem
overextended—your judgment has been approved. It only remains for you to
ratify your perspicacity and definitely join us. We can, I think, offer
you something in full keeping with your ability—a vice presidency of the
reorganized company and a substantial personal interest.”
Alexander attended the speaker half absently, though he realized that
probably he had arrived at the crisis of his life, his career; his
attention was rapt away by dreams, memories. He saw himself again,
saturated with sweat and grime, sitting with Conrad Wishon against
the little house where they slept, and planning his empire of iron; he
thought again, even further back, of the slough of anguish from which
he had won free, and persistently, woven through the entire texture, was
his vision of iron and of pride. He had sworn to himself that he would
build success from the metal for which he had such a personal affinity;
that he would be known as the great Ironmaster of Pennsylvania; and that
unsubstantial ideal, tottering now on the edge of calamity, was still
more potent, more persuasive, than the concrete and definite promises of
safety, prosperity, the implied threat, of the established power before
him.
He had an objective comprehension of the peril of his position, his
negligible funds and decreasing credit, the men with accounts clamoring
for settlement, he thought absurdly of a tessellated floor he had lately
laid in his vestibule; the mingled aggression and uncertainty on every
hand; but his subjective self rose up and dominated him. Louder than
any warning was the cry, the necessity, for the vindication of the
triumphant Alexander Hu-lings, perpetually rising higher. To surrender
his iron now, to enter, a mere individual, however elevated, into a
corporation, was to confess himself defeated, to tear down all the
radiant images from which he had derived his reason for being.
Hulings thought momentarily of Gisela; he had, it might be, no right to
involve her blindly in a downfall of the extent that now confronted him.
However, he relentlessly repressed this consideration, together with
a vague idea of discussing with her their—his—position. His was the
judgment, the responsibility, that sustained them; she was only an
ornament, the singer of little airs in the evening; the decoration, in
embroidery and gilt flowers, of his table.
He thanked the speaker adequately and firmly voiced his refusal of the
offer.
“I am an iron man,” he stated in partial explanation; “as that I must
sink or swim.”
“Iron,” another commented dryly, “is not noted for its floating
properties.”
“I am disappointed, Hulings,” the first speaker acknowledged; “yes, and
surprised. Of course we are not ignorant of the condition here; and you
must also know that the company would like to control your furnaces.
We have offered you the palm, and you must be willing to meet the
consequences of your refusal. As I said, we'd like to have you
too—energetic and capable; for, as the Bible reads, 'He that is not for
me———'”
When they had gone, driving in a local surrey back to the canal,
Alexander Hulings secured his hat and, dismissing his carriage, walked
slowly down to Tubal Cain Forge. An increasing roar and uprush of sooty
smoke and sparks marked the activity within; the water poured dripping
under the water wheel, through the channel he had cleared, those long
years back, with bleeding hands; strange men stood at the shed opening;
but the stream and its banks were exactly as he had first seen them.
His life seemed to have swung in a circle from that former day to
now—from dilemma to dilemma. What, after all, did he have, except an
increasing weariness of years, that he had lacked then? He thought, with
a grim smile, that he might find in his safe nine hundred dollars. All
his other possessions suddenly took on an unsubstantial aspect; they
were his; they existed; yet they eluded his realization, brought him
none of the satisfaction of an object, a fact, solidly grasped.
His name, as he had planned, had grown considerable in men's ears, its
murmur rose like an incense to his pride; yet, underneath, it gave
him no satisfaction. It gave him no satisfaction because it carried no
conviction of security, no personal corroboration of the mere sound.
What, he now saw, he had struggled to establish was a good opinion in
his own eyes, that actually he was a strong man; the outer response,
upon which he had been intent, was unimportant compared with the other.
And in the latter he had not moved forward a step; if he had widened his
sphere he had tacitly accepted heavier responsibilities—undischarged. A
flicker hammered on a resonant limb, just as it had long ago. How
vast, eternal, life was! Conrad Wishon, with his great arched chest and
knotted arms, had gone into obliterating earth.
Death was preferable to ruin, to the concerted gibes of little men,
the forgetfulness of big; once, looking at his greying countenance in
a mirror, he had realized that it would be easier for him to die than
fail. Then, with a sudden twisting of his thoughts, his mind rested on
Gisela, his wife. He told himself, with justifiable pride, that she had
been content with him; Gisela was not an ordinary woman, she had not
married him for a cheap and material reason, and whatever admiration she
had had in the beginning he had been able to preserve. Alexander Hulings
was certain of that; he saw it in a hundred little acts of her daily
living. She thought he was a big man, a successful man; he had not
permitted a whisper of his difficulties to fret her serenity, and, by
heaven, he thought with a sharp return of his native vigor, she never
should hear of them; he would stifle them quietly, alone, one by one.
The idea of death, self-inflicted, a flaccid surrender, receded before
the flood of his returning pride, confidence. Age, he felt, had not
impaired him; if his importance was now but a shell, he would fill it
with the iron of actuality; he would place himself and Gisela for ever
beyond the threats of accident and circumstance.
XIV
GISELA had been to Philadelphia, and she was unusually gay,
communicative; she was dressed in lavender-and-rose net, with black
velvet, and about her throat she wore a sparkling pendant that he had
never before noticed.
“I hope you'll like it,” she said, fingering the diamonds; “the shape
was so graceful that I couldn't resist. And you are so generous,
Alexander!”
He was always glad, he told her briefly, to see her in new and fine
adornments. He repressed an involuntary grimace at the thought of the
probable cost of the ornament. She could hardly have chosen a worse time
in which to buy jewels. Not only his own situation, but the whole time,
was one for retrenchment. The impulse to tell her this was speedily lost
in his pride of her really splendid appearance. He himself had commanded
her to purchase whatever she fancied; he had explained that that—the
domain of beauty—was exclusively hers; and it was impossible to complain
at her first considerable essay.
Here his feeling was rooted in the deepest part of his being—he was,
after all, twenty-five years older than Gisela; and, as if in a species
of reparation for the discrepancy, he owed her all the luxury possible.
This he had promised her—and himself; and an inability to provide gowns
and necklaces and gewgaws was a most humiliating confession of failure,
a failure unendurable to him on every plane. Alexander, too, had told
her finally that she had no place in his affairs of business; and after
that he could not very well burden her with the details of a stupid—and
momentary—need for economy.
“I got a sweet bouquet holder,” she continued; “in chased gold, with
garnets. And a new prayer book; you must see that—bound in carved ivory,
from Paris.” He listened with a stolid face to her recital, vaguely
wondering how much she had spent; how long the jeweler would wait for
settlement. “And there was a wonderful Swiss watch I thought of for you;
it rang the hours and———”
“That,” he said hastily, “I don't need. I have two excellent watches.”
“But you are always complaining!” she returned, mildly surprised. “I
didn't get it, but told the man to put it aside. I'll write if you don't
want it.”
“Do!”
Suddenly he felt weary, a twinge of sciatica shot through his hip; he
must keep out of the damp cast houses, with their expanses of wet sand.
But actually he was as good as he had ever been; better, for he now saw
clearly what he must accomplish, satisfy. The present national crisis
would lift; there was already a talk of the resumption of gold payment
by the state banks; and the collapse of a firm associated with him in
a rolling mill had thrown its control into his hands. Steam power had
already been connected, and he could supply the railroad corporation
with a certain number of finished rails direct, adding slightly to his
profit.
The smallest gain was important, a scrap of wood to keep him temporarily
afloat on disturbed waters; he saw before him, close by, solid land. But
meantime more than one metaphorical wave swept over his head, leaving
him shaken. The Columbus people returned a shipment of iron, with the
complaint that it was below the grade useful for their purpose. He
inspected the rejected bars with his head forgeman, and they were unable
to discover the deficiency.
“That's good puddled iron,” the forgeman asserted. “I saw the pig
myself, and it could have been wrought on a cold anvil. Do they expect
blister steel?”
Alexander Hulings kept to himself the knowledge that this was the
beginning of an assault upon his integrity, his name and possessions.
At court he could have established the quality of his iron, forced the
railroad to accept it within their contract. But he had no money to
expend on tedious legal processes; and they knew that in the city.
“We can get a better price for it than theirs,” he commented.
The difficulty lay in supplying a stated amount. The forgeman profanely
explained something of his troubles with labor:
“I get my own anvils busy, and perhaps the furnaces running out the
metal, when the damn charcoal burners lay down. That's the hardest crowd
of niggers and drunken Dutch that ever cut wood! It's never a week but
one is shot or has his throat cut; and some of the coal they send down
looks like pine ash.”
At their home he found Gisela with the draperies of the dining room in a
silken pile on the carpet.
“I'm tired of this room,” she announced; “it's too—too heavy. Those
plum-colored curtains almost made me weep. Now what do you think? A
white marble mantel in place of that black, and a mirror with wreaths
of colored gilt. An apple green carpet, with pink satin at the
windows, draped with India muslin, and gold cords, and Spanish mahogany
furniture—that's so much lighter than this.” She studied the interior
seriously. “Less ormolu and more crystal,” Gisela decided.
He said nothing; he had given her the house—it was her world, to do with
as she pleased. The decorating of the dining room had cost over three
thousand dollars. “And a big Chinese cage, full of finches and rollers.”
He got a certain grim entertainment from the accumulating details of her
planning. Certainly it would be impossible to find anywhere a wife more
unconscious of the sordid details of commerce. Gisela was his ideal of
elegance and propriety.
Nevertheless, he felt an odd, illogical loneliness fastening on him
here, where he had thought to be most completely at ease. His mind,
filled with the practical difficulties of tomorrow, rebelled against the
restriction placed on it; he wanted to unburden himself of his troubles,
to lighten them with discussion, give them the support of another's
belief in his ability, his destiny; but, with Cryble gone, and his wife
dedicated to purely aesthetic considerations, there was no one to whom
he dared confess his growing predicament.
Marriage, he even thought, was something of a failure—burdensome.
Gisela, in the exclusive rôle of a finch in an elaborate cage, annoyed
him now by her continual chirping song. He thought disparagingly of
all women; light creatures fashioned of silks and perfume; extravagant.
After supper he went directly into his office room.
There, conversely, he was irritated with the accounts spread perpetually
before him, the announcements of fresh failures, depreciated money and
bonds. He tramped back and forth across the limited space, longing to
share Gisela's tranquillity. In a manner he had been unjust to her; he
had seen, noted, other women—his own was vastly superior. Particularly
she was truthful, there was no subterfuge, pretense, about her; and she
had courage, but, John Wooddrop's daughter, she would have. Alexander
Hulings thought of the old man with reluctant admiration; he was strong;
though he, Hulings, was stronger. He would, he calculated brutally, last
longer; and in the end he would, must, win.
XV
YET adverse circumstances closed about him like the stone walls of a
cell. The slightest error or miscalculation would bring ruin crashing
about his pretensions. It was now principally his commanding interest in
the rolling mill that kept him going; his forges and furnaces, short of
workmen, were steadily losing ground. And, though summer was at an end,
Gisela chose this time to divert the labor of a considerable shift
to the setting of new masoned flower beds. He watched the operation
somberly from the entrance of the conservatory attached, like a
parti-colored fantastic glass bubble, to his house.
“It won't take them over four or five days,” Gisela said at his
shoulder.
He positively struggled to condemn her foolish waste, but not a word
escaped the barrier of his pride. Once started, he would have to explain
the entire precarious situation to her—the labor shortage, the dangerous
tension of his credit, the inimical powers anxious to absorb his
industry, the fact that he was a potential failure. He wished, at any
sacrifice, to keep the last from his wife, convinced as she was of his
success.
Surely in a few months the sky would clear and he would triumph—this
time solidly, beyond all assault. He rehearsed this without his usual
conviction; the letters from the Columbus System were growing more
dictatorial; he had received a covertly insolent communication from an
insignificant tool works.
The Columbus Railroad had written that they were now able to secure a
rail, satisfactory for their purpose and tests, at a considerably lower
figure than he demanded. This puzzled him; knowing intimately the whole
iron situation, he realized that it was impossible for any firm to make
a legitimate profit at a smaller price than his. When he learned that
the new contracts were being met by John Wooddrop his face was ugly—the
older man, at a sacrifice, was deliberately, coldly hastening his
downfall. But he abandoned this unpleasant thought when, later, in a
circuitous manner, he learned that the Wooddrop Rolling Mills, situated
ten miles south of the valleys, were running on a new, secret, and
vastly economical system.
He looked up, his brow scored, from his desk. Conrad Wishon's son, a
huge bulk, was looking out through a window, completely blocking off the
light. Alexander Hulings said:
“I'd give a thousand dollars to know something of that process!”
The second Wishon turned on his heel.
“What's that?” he demanded.
Alexander told him. The other was thoughtful.
“I wouldn't have a chance hereabouts,” he pronounced; “but I'm not so
well known at the South Mills. Perhaps——”
Hulings repeated moodily:
“A thousand dollars!”
He was skeptical of Wishon's ability to learn anything of the new
milling. It had to do obscurely with the return of the bars through the
rollers without having to be constantly re-fed. Such a scheme would cut
forty men from the pay books.
A black depression settled over him, as tangible as soot; he felt
physically weary, sick. Alexander fingered an accumulation of bills;
one, he saw, was from the Philadelphia jeweler—a fresh extravagance of
Gisela's. But glancing hastily at its items, he was puzzled—“Resetting
diamond necklace in pendant, fifty-five dollars.” It was addressed to
Gisela; its presence here, on his desk, was an error. After a momentary,
fretful conjecturing he dismissed it from his thoughts; women were
beyond comprehension.
He had now, from the sciatica, a permanent limp; a cane had ceased to be
merely ornamental. A hundred small details, falling wrongly, rubbed on
the raw of his dejection. The feeling of loneliness deepened about him.
As the sun sank, throwing up over, the world a last dripping bath of
red-gold light, he returned slowly to his house.
Each window, facing him, flashed in a broad sheet of blinding
radiance, a callous illumination. A peacock, another of Gisela's late
extravagances, spread a burnished metallic plumage, with a grating cry.
But the hall was pleasantly still, dim. He stood for a long minute,
resting, drawing deep breaths of quietude. Every light was lit in the
reception room, where he found his wife, seated, in burnt-orange satin
and bare powdered shoulders, amid a glitter of glass prisms, gilt and
marble. Her very brilliance, her gay, careless smile, added to his
fatigue. Suddenly he thought—I am an old man with a young wife! His
dejection changed to bitterness. Gisela said:
“I hope you like my dress; it came from Vienna, and was wickedly
expensive. Really I ought to wear sapphires with it; I rather think I'll
get them. Diamonds look like glass with orange.” Her words were lost in
a confused blurring of his mind. He swayed slightly. Suddenly the whole
circumstance of his living, of Gisela's babbling, became unendurable.
His pride, his conception of a wife set in luxury above the facts
of existence, a mere symbol of his importance and wealth, crumbled,
stripping him of all pretense. He raised a thin, darkly veined and
trembling hand.
“Sapphires!” he cried shrilly. “Why, next week we'll be lucky if we
can buy bread! I am practically smashed—smashed at fifty and more.
This house that you fix up and fix up, that dress and the diamonds and
clocks, and—and——They are not real; in no time they'll go, fade away
like smoke, leave me, us, bare. For five years I have been fighting for
my life; and now I'm losing; everything is slipping out of my hands.
While you talk of sapphires; you build bedamned gardens with the men I
need to keep us alive; and peacocks and——”
He stopped as abruptly as he had commenced, flooded with shame at the
fact that he stood before her self-condemned; that she, Gisela, saw in
him a sham. He miserably avoided her gaze, and was surprised when she
spoke, in an unperturbed warm voice:
“Sit down, Alexander; you are tired and excited.” She rose and, with a
steady hand, forced him into a chair. “I am glad that, at last, you
told me this,” she continued evenly; “for now we can face it, arrange,
together. It can't be so bad as you suppose. Naturally you are worn, but
you are a very strong man; I have great faith in you.”
He gazed at her in growing wonderment; here was an entirely different
woman from the Gisela who had chattered about Viennese gowns. He noted,
with a renewed sense of security, the firmness of her lips, her level,
unfaltering gaze. He had had an unformulated conviction that in crises
women wrung their hands, fainted. She gesticulated toward the elaborate
furnishings, including her satin array:
“However it may have seemed, I don't care a bawbee about these things!
I never did; and it always annoyed father as it annoyed you. I am sorry,
if you like. But at last we understand each other. We can live, fight,
intelligently.”
Gisela knew; regret, pretense, were useless now, and curiously in that
knowledge she seemed to come closer to him; he had a new sense of
her actuality. Yet that evening she not only refused to listen to any
serious statements, but played and sang the most frothy Italian songs.
XVI
ON the day following he felt generally upheld. His old sense of power,
of domination, his contempt for petty men and competitions, returned. He
determined to go to Pittsburgh himself and study the labor conditions;
perhaps secure a fresh, advantageous connection. He was planning the
details of this when a man he knew only slightly, by sight, as connected
with the coaling, swung unceremoniously into his office.
“Mr. Hulings, sir,” he stammered, “Wishon has been shot—killed.”
“Impossible!” he ejaculated.
But instantly Alexander Hulings was convinced that it was true. His
momentary confidence, vigor, receded before the piling adversities, bent
apparently upon his destruction.
“Yes, his body is coming up now. All we know is, a watchman saw him
standing at a window of the Wooddrop Mills after hours, and shot him for
trespassing—spying on their process.” Alexander's first thought was not
of the man just killed, but of old Conrad, longer dead. He had been a
faithful, an invaluable, assistant; without him Hulings would never have
risen. And now he had been the cause of his son's death! A sharp regret
seized him, but he grew rapidly calm before the excitement of the
inferior before him.
“Keep this quiet for the moment,” he commanded.
“Quiet!” the other cried. “It's already known all over the mountains.
Wishon's workmen have quit coaling. They swear they will get Wood-drop's
superintendent and hang him.”
“Where are they?” Hulings demanded.
The other became sullen, uncommunicative. “We want to pay them for
this,” he muttered. “No better man lived than Wishon.”
Alexander at once told his wife of the accident. She was still
surprisingly contained, though pale. “Our men must be controlled,” she
asserted. “No further horrors!”
Her attitude, he thought, was exactly right; it was neither callous nor
hysterical. He was willing to assume the burden of his responsibilities.
It was an ugly, a regrettable, occurrence; but men had been killed in
his employ before—not a week passed without an accident, and if he lost
his head in a welter of sentimentality he might as well shut down at
once. Some men lived, struggled upward. It was a primary part of the
business of success to keep alive.
Gisela had correctly found the real danger of their position—the thing
must go no further. The sky had clouded and a cold rain commenced to
fall. He could, however, pay no attention to the weather; he rose from
a partial dinner and departed on a score of complicated and difficult
errands. But his main concern, to locate and dominate the mobbing
charcoal burners, evaded his straining efforts. He caught rumors, echoed
threats; once he almost overtook them; yet, with scouts placed, they
avoided him.