when john told his friend thaddeus he was going to work in the mill thaddeus rolled his tongue in a very droll way.
“you seem surprised.”
“ain’t,” said thaddeus. “ain’t. can’t tell when i’m surprised.”
that was all he would say.
everybody who knew the past was astonished. it was supposed that the young man did not know what he was doing. a very old citizen of quality street, with a glass eye that gave him a furtive, untrustworthy appearance, came to visit aaron’s son on the hotel veranda and approached the subject by stalking it. he was not a presumptuous person. never had he meddled in the affairs of others, though he would say that if he had it would have been more often to their advantage than prejudice. this matter of which he was making at his time of life an exception, a precedent in a sense, was nobody’s business of course. still, in another way it was. there had been a great deal of talk about it. nobody wished to take it upon himself to speak out. that could be understood. there were so many things to think of. feelings of great delicacy were involved. still what a pity, he said—what a pity for any of these reasons to withhold from[109] aaron’s son information he would not come by for himself until it was perhaps too late.
“i must be very stupid,” said john at one of the significant pauses. “you are evidently trying to tell me something.”
“you are going to work in the mill?” said the old citizen.
“yes.”
“do you know what happens to enoch gib’s young men?”
he did not know. the old citizen told him. when he was through aaron’s son thanked him and made no comment. after that people said he knew what he was doing. some said he had a subtle design.
that was not the case. he had an inherited feeling for iron. here was an opportunity to learn the business. there was of course a romantic touch in learning it on the ancestral scene. but that was an after-thought. it never occurred to him that he had a feud to keep with enoch gib. so far as he could see there was more reason for gib to hate him as his father’s son than for him to hate gib as a man who might have been his father if his mother had not changed her mind. his father had never spoken ill of gib—had never spoken of him at all in fact. it was not in the breakspeare character to bequeath a quarrel. and since gib had been willing in this strange way to receive the son of a man whom he hated indelibly why should the son be loath? as for what happened to enoch gib’s young men,—and of this[110] john heard more and more,—that was a matter he lightly dismissed.
a curious fact was that from the first aaron’s son liked enoch gib. perhaps like is too strong a word. his feeling for him was one of irrational sympathy, which, though he did not know it, had been aaron’s feeling for enoch to the end.
when john presented himself at eight o’clock thursday morning gib’s way with him was impersonal and energetic.
“did you ever sell anything?” he asked.
“no,” said john.
“you will,” said gib, “i see it in you.”
he removed the towel from over his coat on the back of the chair, folded the towel, laid it on the desk, and drew on his coat, saying: “i’ll show you now the difference between steel and iron. the first thing to be learned. the last thing to be forgotten.”
they went to the mill yard. laborers were piling up rails that looked all alike to john except that they varied in length and weight. gib led the way straight to an isolate pile and pointed john’s attention to the name of an english firm embossed on the web of each rail.
“that’s a steel rail,” he said. “it’s imported into this country from england. now look.”
he beckoned. four men who knew what he wanted lifted one of those rails and dropped it across a block of pig iron on the ground. it snapped with a clean, crisp break in the middle.
[111]
“that’s steel,” said gib with a gesture of scorn.
the men then laid half of the broken rail with one end on the ground, the other resting on the pig iron block, and hit it a blow with a spike maul. again it snapped.
“that’s a steel rail,” said gib, “to run locomotives and cars over. it breaks as you see,—like glass. when they unload steel rails for track laying they let them over the side of the car in ropes for fear they will break if they fall on the ground.”
the same four men, evidently trained in this demonstration, went directly to another pile of rails, carelessly picked up the one nearest to hand, laid it on the ground against a stout iron post and attached to each end of it a chain working to a windlass some distance off. then they started the windlass. as it wound in the chains, pulling at both ends of the rail, the rail began to bend at the middle around the post. as the windlass continued to wind the rail continued to bend until it became the shape of a hairpin, without breaking, without the slightest sound or sign of fracture.
“that is one of our iron rails,” said gib. “you can’t break it. look at the bend, inside and out.”
john looked. the bent part was smooth on the outside and a little wrinkled on the inside. there was no break in the fibre.
“do it for yourself as often as you like,” said gib. “that’s what the men are here for. we buy steel rails to break. bring anyone who wants to see it. devise any other test you can think of. i want you to[112] sell iron rails.” suddenly he became strange from suppressed emotion. “steel is a crime,” he said, in a tone of judgment. “the only excuse for it is that it’s cheaper than iron. the public doesn’t know. congress doesn’t care. it lets these foreign steel rails come in to compete with american iron rails. the gamblers who build railroads are without conscience. they buy them. yet a man who lays steel rails in a railway track is a common murderer! he will come to be so regarded.”
john was embarrassed. gib’s exhibition of feeling seemed to him inadequately explained by the technical facts. the possibility that personal facts were primarily involved made him suddenly hot and uncomfortable. steel, he knew, had been the symbol of his father’s defeat in new damascus. correspondingly, iron had been the symbol of enoch’s triumph. was it that enoch hated steel as he hated aaron? that his feeling for steel was his feeling for aaron?
it partly was. that day, twenty-five years gone, when aaron made his spectacular steel experiment, with esther watching from the woolwine mansion terrace, was a day of agony for enoch. to aaron and esther a victorious outcome meant power, fortune, the thrill of achievement. for enoch it meant extinction. he could not have survived it in mind or body. simply, he would have died.
the failure of the experiment saved him. it plucked him back from the edge of the void. it saved him in the sight and respect of new damascus. and he had[113] a feeling that it saved him even in the eyes of esther, though from what or for what he could not have said. forever after the word steel had a non-metallurgical meaning. it associated in the depths of his emotional nature with black, ungovernable ideas, including the idea of death.
and now this rare, this altogether improbable irony of teaching aaron’s son the iron trade! of demonstrating to him the fallibility of steel! of sending him forth from new damascus to sell iron rails against steel!
did gib relish the irony? gloat on it, perhaps? that may not be answered clearly. there was at any rate a strong rational motive in his behavior.
hitherto new damascus rails had sold themselves. therefore gib had no sales department in his organization. now steel rails were coming in and steel rails were being sold. there was a powerful selling campaign behind them. the competition was not yet alarming, but it was serious and likely to increase, and the way to meet it was to sell iron rails. gib had business foresight. it revealed to him the use of salesmanship to meet a new condition. what he had been seeking was not then so quickly to be found. that was a selling genius. john breakspeare was not the first young man he had personally conducted through the testing yard. three had already failed him and he was wondering where he should look for another prospect when aaron’s son appeared. gib perceived or felt in him the latency of what he wanted. if the[114] same young man had been anyone else he would have taken hold of him in precisely the same way. the fact of his being aaron’s son—no esther’s—was one to be set aside. the relationship was experimental, on the plane of business, and what might come of it—well, that would appear.
on john’s part a personal sensibility at the beginning gradually wore away as he discovered the drift of events, which was this:
the star of iron was threatened in the first phase of its glory.
the day of steel was breaking.
it was not a brilliant event. it was like a cloudy dawn, unable to make a clean stroke between the light and the dark. yet everyone had a sense of what was passing in this dimness.
gib, whose disbelief in steel rested as much upon pain memories and hatred as upon reason, was a fanatic; but at the same time great numbers of men with no such romantic bias of mind were violently excited on one side or the other of a fighting dispute. fate decided the issue. the consequences were such as become fate. they were tremendous, uncontrollable, unimaginable. they changed the face of civilization. vertical cities, suburbs, subways, industrialism, the rise of a wilderness in two generations to be the paramount nation in the world, victory in the world war,—those were consequences.
it is to be explained.
less than ten years after aaron’s failure the great[115] bessemer process, a way of producing steel direct from ore, was successfully evolved in england, and the british now were producing steel, especially steel rails, in considerable quantities. americans as usual were procrastinating, digressive, self-obstructing. the bessemer patents were bought and brought to this country. a kentucky iron master filed an interference on the ground that although he hadn’t developed it in practice he had had that same idea himself, and had had it first, and his contention was sustained. several years were lost in wrangling over rights. meanwhile, england entered the american market with steel rails. these now were competing with iron rails. when at last the bessemer process began to be tried in this country the principle of perversity that animates the untamed elements bewitched it. disappointments were so continuous, so humiliating, so extremely disastrous, that a period was when one would have thought the whole thing much more likely to be abandoned than persevered with. and when at length there was a useable product at all it was a poor and very uncertain product, comparing unfavorably with english steel, and how the english steel rails compared with good american iron rails has already been witnessed in gib’s mill yard.
man is the only animal that whistles in the dark. being so long in a dogged minority, so much discouraged, so sore in their hope, the protagonists of steel were boastful. they could not boast of their product. it was bad. nor of their success. it was worse. they[116] had to boast of things which one could believe without proof. the bessemer steel process, they said, was the enemy of privilege. it was for the many against the few. it would transform and liberate society and cast down all barriers to progress.
they were the radicals, the visionaries, the theorists, the yes-sayers of their time. many a sound, conservative, no-saying iron man was seduced by their faith to exchange his money for experience.
and all the time, bad as it was, steel kept coming more and more into use, especially,—that is to say, almost exclusively in the form of rails. and the reason the steel rail kept coming into use was that an amazing human society yet unborn, one that should have shapes, aspects, wants, powers and pastimes then undreamed of, was calling for it,—calling especially for the steel rail.
the steel men heard it. that was what kept them in hope. the iron men heard it and were struck with fear.
why was it calling for steel rails instead of iron rails?—steel rails that broke like clay pipes against iron rails that could be tied in knots? did it care nothing for its unborn life and limb? it cared only a little for life and limb. much more it cared about bringing its existence to pass, and that was impossible with iron rails, with anything but steel rails, for reasons that we already know, having passed them. they require only to be focused at this point.
it was true of the iron rail that it was unbreakable[117] and therefore safe and superior to the steel rail for all uses of human society in the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century. that was still the iron age. but human society as it would be in the twentieth century was calling for a rail that would meet the needs of a steel age. this was a society that was going to require a ton of freight to be moved 2,500 miles annually for each man, woman and child in the country! transportation on that scale of waste and grandeur had never been imagined in the world. iron rails simply could not stand the strain. they would not break under it. they would be smashed flat. they would wear out almost as fast as they could be spiked down.
it was true of the steel rail, as the iron people said, that it was very breakable, of tricky temper, dangerous to life and limb. society in 1870 ran much more safely on iron rails. but the unborn society of the steel age was making rail specifications beforehand. it was a society for which a quarter of a million miles of railway would have to be laid in one generation. that simply could not be done with iron rails. there would not be enough fuel, labor and time by the old wrought iron process to make or replace iron rails on any such scale. shoeing that society with iron rails would be like shoeing an army with eiderdown slippers.
the iron people of course could make a steel in their own way from wrought iron, melted again and carbonized,—fine, cutlery steel, very hard and trustworthy,—but you could not dream of making rails by the[118] millions of tons from that kind of steel. the making of it was too slow and the cost prohibitive.
the three primary desiderata in the oncoming society’s rail problem were hardness, cheapness, quantity.
the new process produced a rail within these three requirements. it was hard because it was steel. it was cheap because the steel was got direct from the ore at an enormous saving of time and fuel. and it could be made in practically unlimited quantities.
the bessemer method made possible at once an increase of one hundred fold in metallic production. that was miraculous.
the iron age took three thousand years.
the steel age developed in thirty.
enoch gib stood with his face to it. he fought it with his eyes closed. his strength crystallized against it. when it passed him by with a rush and uproar it passed new damascus. never was a pound of steel fabricated at new damascus. it was an iron town. steel towns grew up around it. that made no difference so long as he lived, and when he was gone, then it was too late. opportunity had forsaken that spot.
the meaning of events is swift. yet events are spaced with days and days are of equal length, lived one at a time. historically you see that the iron rail was suddenly and hopelessly doomed. but from a contemporary point of view one might have been for a long time in doubt. it was not until 1883, thirteen years after john’s arrival in new damascus, that the steel rail definitely superseded the iron rail.
