I
Every time he came back, after a brief visit in the South American
capital, to the gorge where he was building the great bridge, Lovat's
heart would throb and his throat swell with pride as he looked at the
great stone structure spanning the Andean chasm. First the little
train would come puffing and straining up the grade, on the iron path
between the lavish tropic greenery. Then there were the peaks of
mountains, daring the sky, their tops lightly muffled with snow.
_Nevada_, went the Spanish word, soft as the snow itself. Then,
imminent, one felt, was the drop of the gorge, a dramatic descent that
stopped the heart in its rhythmic beating. "Here is the end!" one
said. And then the bridge!
Soaring, splendid, slender, strong, its arches spanning the tumbling
river beneath, the great bridge ran like a rainbow from mountain to
mountain. Lovat thought of it, with its lightness, its perfection, its
spurning of the ground, as a spirit that crossed with winged unwetted
feet the challenging river beneath. It suggested, somehow, Artemis in
the dusk, with a tongue of fire above her proud brow.
The wonder and the miracle of it never failed to thrill him. All the
harsh practical details of his work, details of thrust and strain, of
fitting springer to pier, and voussoir to springer, of the curve of
intrados, of the strength of abutments, never took away from him the
sense that he had done, was doing, a great and practical thing. These
mountains, that composition of jungle, that smashing drop to the
turbulent river, the snarling waters themselves--all these were the
work of the Great Mason, the detail of his Divine Hand. So they were
when and so they had remained since the heavens and the earth were
finished and all the host of them, and He rested on the seventh day
from all the work which He had made.
But a day would come, the Master of the Masons knew and had ordained,
when the welter of passionate nature would subside, and the small race
of mankind He had fashioned would reach a place of progress in their
journey when this would have to be bridged. Then one of His prentice
men would do it. And Lovat experienced a sense of holiness that he had
been the chosen one.
Lovat looked at the bridge with wonder and with pride each time he
returned, but each time he returned he felt somehow that the bridge had
been jealous of his absence, resented it, became temperamental as a
woman. Whilst he was there everything was right. There were
accidents, of course, but they were the recognized risks of a great
venture, the ordinary failure of the human factor in a Titanic
equation. But when he was away strange things happened. Now an
unaccountable error in laying this or that, now a sudden collapse of
machinery, now a terrible accident to the native workmen. But when he
was there, all was well. It seemed as if the bridge demanded all his
time, all his talent, all his attention.
It occurred to him there was a sort of contest between him and the
bridge, a sort of quiet, deadly fight, as between a man and a spirited
horse he is riding in a steeplechase. He felt, too, that all the
strange things about him knew it--the surly river, the whispering
jungle, the majestic mountains, the cold observant stars. These could
tell him what it was, for they had observed all things, seeing history
begin and peoples fade and nations rise. They had seen great
prehistoric animals flap wings terrible and dark as a demon's. They
had seen these things die and be forgotten. They were of nature and
knew humanity, and they could tell him, if they wished.
But they told nothing. They observed the cruel law of silence, which
all nature knows and dead men learn. The business was his and the
bridge's. Let the twain fight it out.
"I 'm getting morbid, up here in the mountains," Lovat complained, and
he turned abruptly to think of a month from now, when Cecily would come
south from New York to marry him in Cartagena, and to be with him for
the last days before the bridge was opened. Her dark, serious eyes and
cloudy hair and serious smiling mouth were before him, but the shadow
of the bridge rose between him and the vision of her like a barred
door....