Garet Garrett

“ A puddling furnace is a long, narrow, maw-like chamber of brick and fire clay with a depressed floor for the molten iron to lie in and a small square door at the end. It is heated to inferno by a cataract of flame rising from a fire pit at one side and sucked by draught [102] across the roof of its mouth. When the whole interior is like a dragon’s gullet, white hot, wicked and devouring, cold pigs of iron are cast in, the door is banged to, the chinks are stopped and the puddler gathers up his strength. ”

“ Beyond was that to which all this hubbub appertained. The city!... Sudden epic!... Man’s forethought of escape ... his refuge ... his self-overwhelming integration. Anything may happen in a city. Career is there, success is there, failure, anguish, horror, women, hell, and heaven. One has the sense of moral fibres loosening. Lust of conquest stirs. The spirit of adventure flames. A city is a tilting field. Unknown, self-named, anyone may enter, cast his challenge where he will, and take the consequences. The penalties are worse than fatal. The rewards are what you will.
“New York!” ”

“ I see miles of smoking chimneys where steel is made for all these uses in unimaginable quantities. And spanning the prismal chasm I see a series of great steel bridges, multiplying as I look, seeming to cast themselves in air across the void like cobwebs. But reflect! We have not yet discovered the way to make this steel. Unless we find it quickly we shall fail that unborn host. It cannot get across; if it did it could not live. The iron bridge cannot bear its weight. Nor can the world be prepared with iron. ”

“ She leased an old house in West Tenth Street and had it all made over into studio apartments, four above to be let by favor to whom she liked and one very grand on the ground floor for herself. Then she became a patron of the arts. It is an easy road. Art is hungry for praise and attention. Artists are democratic. They keep no rules, go anywhere, have lots of time and love to be entertained by wealth, if only to put their contempt upon it. The hospitality of a buyer must be bad indeed if they refuse it. Vera’s hospitality was attractive in itself. ”

“ One night John recognized in the hotel lobby a figure that tormented both the flesh and the spirit of Pittsburgh,—the flesh by wasting its substance and the spirit by keeping always before it a riddle it had not solved. He was a frail, bent little man, not yet old, with a long thin mustache and a pleasing, naïve voice that had cost several iron men their entire fortunes. Wood Street bankers wished he were dead or had never been born. This was Tillinghast, metallurgist and engineer, who had already designed and constructed four steel plants that were a total loss. ”

“ With already the cheapest railroad transportation in the world, people were clamoring for it to be made cheaper. Crazy Populists were telling the farmers it ought to be free, like the air. Prejudice against railroads was amazing, irrational and suicidal. All profit in railroading had been taxed and regulated away. Incentive to build new roads had been destroyed. If by a special design of the Lord a railroad did seem to prosper the politicians pounced upon it and either mulcted it secretly or held it forth to the public as a monster that must be chained up with restrictive laws. ”

“ To serve but one of these cities,—to bring its food and take away its manufactures,—I see a thousand railroad trains,—trains of steel running on rails of steel. Compared with these the iron shod trains we know and think so marvellous are merely toys. I see ships of steel so vast in size that on the side of one the little vessel in which Columbus found a new world would swing like a silly skiff. I see steel in all its power—towers, tunnels, aqueducts, fantastic structures I cannot sense the meaning of. ”

“ For several years the public, now restored to high prosperity, observed with interest, awe, even with pride the appearance of those vast anonymous shapes which capital by a headlong impulse had been raising up to control production and transportation. Mergers, combines, trusts,—they came in endless succession. Hardly a day passed without a new sensation in phantasmic millions. People were seized with a gambling mania. Each day promoters threw an enormous mass of new and unseasoned securities upon the market, and they were frantically bought, as if the supply were in imminent danger of failing. ”

“ They struggle, overwhelm themselves and fall into the void like a cataract.”
“Why is that?” asked Esther.
“Because the number that can cross is limited by the preparations of the living,” Aaron answered. “The living are selfish and forgetful. All this I see as it has been for ages, as now it is, and as it shall be. Always it has been as it is on the other side—that infinite, voiceless, despairing multitude pressing down to the brink of the void. Here in the world of the living there has been some change. We have the power of preparation. ”

“ In 1894 they were mad about money,—not about the use, possession and distribution of it, but as to the color of it, whether it should be silver,—that is to say, white like the symbol of those old worshippers of the masculine faculty, or gold,—that is, red inclining to yellow, as was the symbol of those who in the dimness of human history adored the feminine faculty. ”

“ Here were men like Thane whose genius fashioned tools in the guise of sentient creatures,—walking tools, thinking tools, co-operating tools, with eyes and ears and nerves and powers of discrimination. Human tools but that they lacked the sense of good and evil.
Fancy a tool larger than an elephant keeping vigil before a row of furnaces, pacing slowly up and down, apparently brooding, and then at the right moment opening a door and plucking forth a block of incandescent steel weighing many tons, neatly, with not the slightest effort, and nowhere in sight a human being! ”

“ Unconsciously Galt worked on the principle that once a thing has happened it cannot unhappen. The fact of its having happened is original and irrevocable. Every other fact in the universe must adjust itself to that one. Something else may happen the next instant; that is a new happening again.
Mr. Valentine was violently agitated by the traffic manager’s dismissal. If he had been consulted he would have made an issue of it. But there it was. It had happened. The fact created a situation. He might refuse to accept the situation, but he could not extinguish the fact. ”

“ Business as it was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century also is far away. Nothing like it can ever happen again. It was utterly lawless, free in its own elemental might, lustful and glamorous. The barbaric invasion that overturned Roman civilization was more obvious as a spectacle but no more extraordinary, no more unexpected, and perhaps as it shall turn out, no more significant, than America’s economic invasion of the world in the steel age. ”

“ Nobody seemed very sanguine about the Coxey plan; nobody understood it, in fact; yet something would have to be done; people couldn’t live without work.
Unemployment was the basic grievance. I took a group of twenty, all skilled workmen, sixteen of them married, and found that for each of them the average number of wage earning days in a year had been twelve. They blamed the money power in Wall Street. When they were asked how the money power could profit by their unemployment, what motive it could have in creating hard times, they took refuge in meaningless phrases. ”

“ No wonder. Who in a white shirt could bring a fire to its zenith? He disappeared into the gloom and was lost for five minutes. When he reappeared he was in the puddler’s rig he had worn earlier in the day,—naked to the middle, trousers rolled at the waist, cowhide shoes, gloves and skullcap. Now he could talk to the fire. As he thrust the javelin into its throat it roared back at him like an angry beast. He made it turn over, lie down, turn over again and rear on its legs. For moments he was swallowed up in smoke and Agnes could scarce restrain a shriek of thrill and terror. ”

“ Every few days there’s a rumor on the Stock Exchange that we are busted, as so many other railroads are, and then the speculators, as I told you, create so much uproar and confusion that no legitimate buyer can find a legitimate seller, but all must do business with the speculator, who plays upon their emotions in the primitive manner by means of terrifying sounds and horrible grimaces. ”

“ It could not have done so without steel rails under its feet, and if it had not doubled and then doubled again this now would be a German world. Democracy even then was shaping its weapons for Armageddon through men who knew nothing about it. They were free egoists, seeking profit, power, personal success, everyone attending to his own greatness. Never before in the world had the practise of individualism been so reckless, so purely dynamic, so heedless of the Devil’s harvest. ”

“ If a man with whom he meant to do business insisted upon talking beside the point he would say: “Go outside to make your speech and then come back.” He never read a newspaper. He looked at it, sniffed, crumpled it up and cast it from him, all with one gesture. Four or five times a day he ran a yard or two of ticker tape through his fingers and glanced in passing at the news printing machine. Magazines and books were non-existent matter. Yet within the area of his own purposes no fact, no implication of fact, was ever lost.
Meanwhile Great Midwestern stock was slowly rising. ”

“ But from one who is never unjust you shall not expect generosity. Human beings do not crave justice; they accept it. What they long for is understanding through sympathy. Christopher Gib had no chemistry of sympathy. It was left out of him. Therefore he had no emotional understanding of people and people had no rational understanding of him. His tragedy was invisible. He was denied what he could not give, namely, bread of the sweetened loaf without price, for which everyone hungers. Contempt for all the sentimental aspects of life was the self-saving device of his ego. ”

“ Wall Street was the stronghold of the gold people. It was to Wall Street that the government came to sell bonds for the gold it required to replenish its gold fund. The spectacle of the Secretary of the Treasury standing there with his hat out, like a Turkish beggar, was viewed exultingly by the gold people. “Carlisle’s Bonds Won’t Go,” said the New York Sun in a front page headline, on one of these occasions. Carlisle was the Secretary of the United States Treasury, entreating the gold people to buy the government’s bonds with gold. ”

“ A man with a record for sanity would suddenly lose his balance and cast away the substance of certainty to pursue a vision. The effort to adapt the Bessemer steel process to American conditions was an irresistible road to ruin. That process was producing amazing results in Europe but in this country it was bewitched with perversity and it looked as if the English and German manufacturers would walk away with the steel age. Fortunes were still being swallowed up in snail shaped vessels called converters, not unlike the one Aaron had built at New Damascus twenty-five years before. ”

“ So many winds running their feet together, like people in a mob, create a storm; and when it is over and they are themselves again, sane little winds, they wonder at what was done. The Wall Street news tickers reported that certain banks were refusing to lend money on Galt securities. This may have been a stroke of the conspiracy or merely a reaction to the prevailing fear, or both interacting. One never knows. But it was true, and Great Midwestern securities suffered another frightful fall. ”

“ Men were tormenting the elements, parting iron from his natural affinities, giving him in new marriage without love or consent, audaciously creating what God had forgotten—steel! steel! steel! There in that smutted deep were tools walking about like fabled monsters, obedient and docile, handling flaming ingots of metal with the ponderous ease and precision of elephants moving logs. There amid clangor and confusion shrieking little bipeds were raising gigantic ominous shapes from shapelessness. ”

“ Buggies, two-wheelers, open carts and spring wagons line both sides of the street. The horses are blanketed. A damp, chill wind is blowing. Vendors from Chicago, lewd-looking men, working a hundred feet apart, are yelling: “Git a Christ army button here fer a nickel!” There is a composite smell of ham sandwiches, peanuts, oranges and cigars.
A shout rises at the far end of the street. The crowd that has been so thick there, filling the whole space, bursts open. A band begins playing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and the spectacle is present.
First comes a negro bearing the American flag. ”

“ In Aaron’s case romance and work were easily combined, for as love is an adventure of the spirit, so to a man of his temperament work is a romantic enterprise of the mind and creative in a manner less wonderful than the mysterious life process only because we take it for granted. What is an engine? a steamship? a blast furnace? a tower? It is the materialization in form and function of an idea itself imponderable. It is the psychic power of man exteriorized in substance and there is no accounting for such phenomena save that it happens. ”

“ One evening late, with a particularly interesting nocturnal adventure behind us, we stood in the hallway saying good-night. We said it and lingered; said it again and still lingered. She was more excited than usual. Her lips were slightly parted. She almost never blushed, but on rare occasions, such as now, there was a feeling of pink beneath the deep brunette color of her skin.
Her beauty seemed of a sudden to expand, to become greatly exaggerated, not in quality but in dimensions, so that it excluded all else from the sense of space. The sight of it unpoised me. And she knew. ”

“ The workers, uttering shrill cries of anxiety, readiness, encouragement and damnation, seized the levers controlling the vessel and tilted it over to a spilling position. Through the black smoke that corked its throat burst the fluid, blazing metal, hissing like a tortured serpent, alive in every incandescent crystal, yet doomed quickly to cool and blacken, every element touching it being fatally adverse. Men in waiting caught it headfirst neatly into a trundle pot and wheeled it off to be decanted into sand molds, like pig iron molds, but smaller. ”

“ One evening on my return from an urgent trip to New York Natalie came racing down the great hall to meet me, with a flying slide at the end, as in the old days she was wont to meet Galt, and whether she meant it quite, or miscalculated the distance, I do not know; but anyhow I had either to let her go by off her balance or catch her, and she landed in my arms.
“Oh, Coxey, he’s asking for you,” she said, getting her feet and dragging me along at a run. “He’s better all at once. He can talk.” ”

“ On a rainy Wall Street morning in late December, with no sign or gesture of anguish, the Great Midwestern Railroad gave up its corporate existence and died.
It was a shapeless event.
Ten men sat around the long table in the Board Room smoking, fidgeting, irritably watching the time. These were the eminent directors. They were men whose time nobody could afford to waste,—enterprisers in credit, capital, oil, coal, metals and [Pg 116] packing house products. They wished the obsequies to begin promptly and be as brief as possible, for they had many other things to mind. ”

“ Business of course has many facets. It was not merely the affairs of Gib and Breakspeare they discussed. They debated the future of iron, metallurgical processes, the blundering stupidity of Congress.
The feud between politics and business was never new. An economic truth more obvious than daylight to the industrial founders was even then a tangle of obscurities to Congress. What statesmen could not see clearly, once for all, was that without high tariff protection the American iron industry would live at the mercy of foreign competitors. ”

“ 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 disturber was Jonas Gates, a dry, mottled little man, indecorously old and lewdly alert, with a shameless, impish sense of pleasantry. He practiced usury on a large scale as a kind of Stock Exchange pawn broker, lending money to people in difficulties at high rates of interest until they had nothing more to pledge and then cutting them off at the pockets. ”

“ You never spoke of it before.”
“You never mentioned it, either,” said Aaron. “You would prefer to go alone?”
“The idea of a partnership is new to me,” said Enoch.
“But wouldn’t it be advantageous to develop our ore and coal holdings jointly? They lie together.”
“Yes,” said Enoch, “I can see that.”
“Is it only the newness of the idea that bothers you?”
“I would not have entertained the thought as my own,” he said. “Since it comes from you I do not reject it. I merely do not wish to be responsible for it. You are not a man for business. Your father was not. ”

“ As a railroad executive Valentine for all his experience was inefficient. This had been always tolerantly understood. But now with Galt’s work beginning to produce results in contrast the fact was openly admitted. Galt’s touch was sure, propulsive and unhesitating. And besides, in whatever he did there was an element of fortuity that could not be reasoned about. He not only did the right things; he did them at precisely the right time.
“You remember what I told you a long time ago,” said Harbinger. “He sees things before they happen. My heart breaks for the old man ... but it’s no use.” ”

“ A scourge of unemployment fell upon the land and labor as such, with no theory of its own about money, knowing only what it meant to be out of work, assailed the befuddled intelligence of the country with that embarrassing question: Why were men helplessly idle in this environment of boundless opportunity? ”

“ THE CINDER BUGGY
I A generation has fled since a stranger was seen in the streets of New Damascus on an errand of business.
The town has nothing to sell except the finest wrought iron in the world. As the quality of this iron is historic and the form of it a standard muck bar for use in further manufacture you order it from afar at a price based on what is current in Pittsburgh.
Sellers of merchandise miss New Damascus on purpose. It is a catalogue town. It buys nothing because it is new, nothing it does not need, has no natural pride in waste whatever. ”

“ The art of transportation is undiscovered. Hence frightful famines on the bounteous earth. Then in his imagination man finds a ship. That makes it possible to transport food long distances, and yet the world is hardly touched. Life is increasable only on the rim of the sea and in the valleys of rivers. An inland city is impossible.
“At length the iron age. It is our time. By mechanical means man has enormously increased his power to prepare the world for that infinite multitude unborn. It is tremendously excited—the voiceless, spectral multitude. It presses more wildly toward the void. ”

“ Money is not a thing either true or untrue. It is merely a token of other things which are useful and enjoyable. Both silver and gold are sound for that purpose. Their use is of convenience, and the proportions and quantities in which they shall circulate as currency is rationally a matter of arithmetic. Yet here were millions of people emotionally crazed over the question of which should be paramount, one side talking of the crime of dethroning silver and the other of the gold infamy. ”

“ The final irony was that Gib should have discovered it, for it belonged to the steel age and was destined to be turned against him. In this young man who could sell iron rails he prepared a weapon for his invincible adversary.
The steel age always knew in advance what it needed. Salesmanship was its very breath. Why? Because when it came suddenly, like a natural event, men found themselves in command of means for producing wealth,—that is to say, goods, enormously beyond any scale of human wants previously imaginable. Production attended to itself. ”

“ Blindly on the spot he rears an altar, lays the wood in order and looks to see what offering hath in a miraculous manner provided itself to be burnt. Lo! there stands the one thing most beloved in all the world. The Lord sometimes interferes, as for Isaac. Sometimes the victim saves itself. Then again the man draws back. He has not the heart to do it.
John drew back. To conclude the covenant with Thane meant forswearing Agnes in his heart forever. That was a vow he could neither bring himself to make nor trust himself to keep. And yet, any secret reservation seemed treachery to Thane. ”

“ By a law of coincidence that we do not understand, and may not exist, they began to meet outside the household, purely, as it seemed in each case, by accident,—in unexpected places, on the street again and again, once at night in a crowd at an open air Punch and Judy show in which neither of them was at all interested, once in Philadelphia where he was transacting business and she was shopping with her maid, and once in a memorable way on a path through the woods to Throne Rock, a natural seat on the mountain summit from which the view of the valley was exciting. ”

“ Aaron returned to New Damascus with a new steel making patent, an infant and an empty heart.
What there was in the patent nobody ever knew. He did nothing with it. The whole steel adventure was too intimately associated with memories of Esther. To succeed without her would be worse than to fail. He could not think of it. There was very little in this world he could think of. He could not bear living in the mansion without her. He closed it and went to live at the inn with his child and nurse. ”

“ The name was Aaron Breakspeare.
“I knew him,” he said, now gazing at the young man. “Knew him well, I might say. Everybody around here did. You ain’t his boy?”
“He was my father,” said the young man. “Will it be all right to——?”
“And he’s sent himself home,” said Weir. “Sent himself home to be buried. You all alone?”
“I’m the whole family,” said the young man with a smile that made Weir look away. “Will it be all right,” he began to ask again, and hesitated before the pronoun. For nearly a week he had been travelling with this freight and the dilemma was new each time. ”