The Cinder Buggy

by Garet Garrett

  “Aaron!” she called again. “What does it matter? Come back to me.”

  At that he started slightly and began to talk in a slow, far-away manner, very much as he had talked to Enoch that moonlight night after the birthday party when the idea of making New Damascus an iron town had suddenly crystallized in his mind. Esther, loving the mere sound of his voice, did not at first get the sense of his speech. He was saying:

  “Out there in unlimited space are the unborn....”

  These were the first words she understood. They thrilled her. She was almost faint with an ecstasy that ran through her fibre up and down. “So,” she thought, “it was that.” And she had been thinking he was far away. Now she listened tensely. He went on:

  “... Millions, infinite millions, clamoring to get born, perhaps dying because they cannot cross. Here is life on this side. There, out there, is but the hope of it.”

  “Cross what?” asked Esther, awesomely. “You speak as if you were gazing at it.”

  “Between life that is and life unborn I see the primal chasm,” he said. “We who live have crossed. We do not remember how. The number that can cross is small. You cannot imagine how small it is. Only one in millions has the luck to get across. The rest are crowded on the edge, weeping, reaching out their hands, silently imploring us to get them over.

  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. How pitiably we have exercised it! I’ll tell you all that has ever happened. Long ago, before he began by imagination to extend his faculties, man was like the other animals. He had only his hands and legs, his sheer brute strength, to work with. He housed himself in holes and caves and ate what the untilled earth set forth. You must imagine then across that primal chasm a chain of human bodies, a living monkey bridge, by which the unborn came to life most dangerously. How few they were! And yet, if more had come just then they would have starved,—died here instead of there,—because the means did not exist to house and clothe and feed them. It is man’s business not only to bridge the chasm; he must also beforehand prepare the world for those who cross. Come ten thousand years through time this way. Now see him beginning to till the soil. See him building huts. More life may be sustained. Above the void a swaying bridge of sticks. More may safely get across. And yet so very few I Another thousand years. Enter historic man. He builds him cities and fine temples and there is a narrow stone arch to span the void. The bridge, as you will note, is at any time of that material in which mankind is working. This is better. The unborn begin to rush across. But, alas! the case is worse than ever. Many now are born that never will be fed. Why?

  “Imagine the world at this time in panorama. There are cities, noble cities walled about; but they are few and very far apart, and the world at large is still an untilled waste. Tillage is in small adjacent areas, and when the produce of those areas is not enough the people in the cities starve. Further away are vast fertile plains uncultivated. They are of no use because food cannot be transported thousands of miles in great quantities. 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 increaseable 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. An iron bridge has replaced the stone arch. It is a sign that many more may come. Now with railroads it is possible to bring food quickly from afar. No fertile area of the earth is inaccessible. Inland cities may begin to rise. More life in more ways can be sustained than ever before. Nevertheless, the iron bridge is a premature sign. The material is defective. It is not hard enough to bear the strain of that host pressing upon life. Besides, by no process yet discovered can it be made fast enough.

  “And I see what has not yet happened. I see whole cities built higher than the tower of Babel. Those are steel buildings, sheathed with brick and stone. Brick and stone upon mortar would not stand so high. 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. 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. These things of iron are premature, too soft, too slowly made, not big enough. Now do you know what it is we seek?”

  “Forgive me. I did not mean to speak lightly of it,” Esther said. “None of this had been revealed to me.”

  “Nor to me,” said Aaron. “Not clearly until this instant. Man works mostly in the dark, without knowing what he seeks or why....”

  They repeated the experiment many times, never with precisely the same technical result, though always with the same disappointment. The metal they got was worthless. It was neither iron nor steel. The process was true. It remarkably foreshadowed the Bessemer process which some years later did achieve the result, revolutionize the industry and cause steel to overlap iron. It failed in Aaron’s hands for want of skill and chemical knowledge. The elements are not passive. They are wilful and rebellious. In their efforts to thwart man’s designs upon them they become cunning and clannish. One helps the other to escape. With this same mechanical equipment steel workers of a later time would have been able to make a perfect steel. They would have known how at a certain stage of the process to cast into the fiery, detonating mass a handful of some tame, cajoling substance, and then the exact instant at which to stop the air blast and tilt the vessel to a spilling position.

  Aaron was discouraged but not despairing. Half his fortune was gone. Still, it was not an irretrievable disaster.

  To hold his organization together he built a small rolling mill. He called it the Blue Jay. The site on which it stood may still be seen in New Damascus after all these years. Nothing else has ever occupied it. The mill was large enough to keep two blast furnaces going,—that is, it absorbed their output of pig iron. This was merely to fill a gap. He was bent upon steel. Having opened the mill and having found a market for all the Blue Jay iron it could make, again he took Esther and went to Europe on the same quest as before.

  While they were abroad a son was born. They named him John.

  On the homeward voyage Esther died and was buried at sea. The waters at last did swallow her up.

  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 h
e 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. Then presently he could not bear living in New Damascus without her. People said it was the state of his fortunes that made him morose. He had meant to retrieve his fortunes with Esther standing by. Now he neglected business, caring nothing about it, until one day he came awake to the fact that even so little business as it takes to support a lone man and child will not attend to itself. He had to do something. But he could not do it there.

  One day he dismantled the mill, loaded it in a canal boat, abandoned the irremovable blast furnaces, took his child in his arms and disappeared.

  The Blue Jay Rolling Mill became famous not for its output but for its migrations. He set it up in Scranton, then moved it to Pittsburgh. It was next reported in Texas and after that in Colorado. Then he ceased to be heard of, except once, when the old Woolwine Mansion was sold to a Roman Catholic order.

  So he vanished from the light of New Damascus, with his steel patent, his grief and the fourth generation in swaddling cloths,—vanished away on a flying iron mill.

  VIII

  MEANWHILE what of Enoch? He prospered in power and wealth and his soul turned black. From his birth he had been cruel, legal, injurious. The tragedy of Esther’s elopement left a horrible sting in his face for everyone to see. After that he became, as the Damascenes said, unnatural. In that word they characterized and judged his conduct; they never understood it. They could not say in what his unnaturalness consisted. His acts were not unnatural as acts in themselves, nor in contrast, sum or degree. They were unnatural because they were his. He disbelieved in friendship; he knew it not and doubted its existence. He disbelieved in love, too, though not for the same reason.

  Esther he had loved.

  A man mortally hurt in love may do almost anything naturally. He is sick prey for the cuckoo woman willing to lay her egg in another’s nest. She has only to touch him with her fingers softly and hold her tongue, but to make a soothing, mothering sound, and he will impale himself without looking.

  But Jonet, daughter of Gearhard the blacksmith, was not that kind of woman. She could not have made that sound. And it seemed somehow unnatural that Enoch should marry her. No sound that was in him could imaginably vibrate in her. According to the local notion the girl was queer. Men let her alone because she made them vaguely uneasy. Her phantasies were of the primeval outdoors. She was sometimes seen in the deep woods by herself, dancing and singing as if she were not alone. She named the trees and conversed with non-existent objects. Her hair was black. Her eyes were brown and glistened. Her face was the color of iron at cherry-red heat and she had the odor of a wild thing. Enoch married her out of hand. There was no courtship. Then he proceeded to build a mansion on the west hill larger and more ostentatiously ugly than the Woolwine Mansion on the east hill. Some said, “Ah-ha! He has learned his lesson. No woman would live in that gloomy iron stone house.” Others said he did it neither in wisdom nor in love of Jonet, but to spite Bruno Mitchell, who, though he was blameless of anything that had happened, was yet Esther’s father.

  A peculiarity of the Gib mansion was much talked of at the time. It was built on a twin principle,—that is, in halves, separated only by an imaginary bisecting line. Each half was as like the other as the right hand is like the left. There were two portals exactly alike, two halls, two parlons, two grand stairways, two kitchens, everything in parallel duplication until it came to the enormous solarium, which was a glass court between the two parts, the imaginary line cutting through the fountain in the center. The Philadelphia architect supposed there were two families. When he discovered it was all for one man and one wife not yet long enough married to have children he could not conceal his wonder.

  “Well, why not?” said Enoch. “Haven’t you two lungs, two kidneys, two ears? One of each would do.”

  The idea may have been thus derived from a principle of insurance through pairing which nature has evolved. It may have been. Nevertheless in time the imaginary dividing line became real. It was painted through the middle of the solarium. Jonet lived on one side and he on the other and there was no going to and fro,—not for Jonet. Agnes, their daughter, was brought to his side by the nurses until she was big enough to walk. She could cross the line as she pleased. But generally she had to be coaxed or bribed to cross to Enoch’s side and was always anxious to cross back.

  Between Enoch and Mitchell the subject of Esther was never mentioned, not even at first. For a while they went on as if nothing had happened. Gradually Mitchell became aware that Enoch was putting pressure upon him, silently, deliberately. He made harder and harder terms for the banker’s services, until Mitchell’s profit in the relationship was destroyed, and when this fact was pointed out to Enoch he suggested a simple remedy, which was that the relationship should discontinue. As Mitchell seemed disinclined to act on this suggestion Enoch at length invited a Wilkes-Barre man to come and open a bank in New Damascus. Enoch himself provided most of the capital. The town’s business went to the new bank naturally. It was

  Gib’s bank and Gib was a man to be propitiated in the community. Moreover, his turning from Mitchell caused Mitchell’s bank to be regarded with a tinge of doubt. Thus Mitchell’s hope in the star of iron miserably perished. His bank withered up. His years becoming heavy he returned to New England to die.

  The saying was that Enoch broke him. It would have been quite as easy to say that Mitchell broke himself upon Enoch. Yet in putting it the other way people implied a certain subtle truth wherein lay the difference between Enoch Gib and other men,—the fact of his being unnatural. His feeling toward Mitchell was natural. Anyone could understand that. It was a feeling transferred from Esther to her father. Because he loved Esther he could not hate her as much as his hurt required; therefore he hated her father more. But where another man would have manifested this feeling in some overt, unmistakable manner, Enoch so concealed it that for a long time Mitchell did not suspect its existence. And when he was aware of it, then it was too late. If Enoch had committed upon him some definite act of unreason that would have seemed natural. Instead, he exerted against him a kind of slow, deadly hydraulic pressure. Nor was that all. Revenge may require the infliction of a protracted remorseless torture. Even that one may understand. But Gib, while exerting this killing pressure, apparently had no more feeling about it than one would have about an automatic, self-recording test for torsonial strength applied to a piece of iron, knowing that ultimately it was bound to break. If he had enjoyed it, if he had seemed to derive malicious satisfaction from the sequel, that would have made it human.

  Yet here was a man but bearing witness for the child. The trait of character which appeared in his locked arm game with Aaron, in their boyhood, when it was Aaron’s arm that broke, now fulfilled itself. There was in him a strange passion for trying the strength of materials. He invented various mechanical devices for that purpose. He knew to an ounce what iron would stand under every kind of strain. He knew what it took to crush a brick. Apparently his first thought on looking at anything was, “What is its breaking point?” The only way to find out was to break it. And people to him were like any other kind of material. He had the same curiosity about them. What could they stand without breaking? As in human material the utmost point of resistance is a variable factor he had to find it over and over. It is by no means certain that the mood in which he exercised this passion was deliberately destructive. That the final point of resistance is coincident with the point of destruction probably never once occurred to him as a tragic fact.

  He might have said of people that in any case they were free to decline the test. They were not obliged to measure their strength with his. Yet they did it and they did it as if they could not help doing it. Here was a strange matter.

  For example, how did he hold his iron workers? They hated him. They cursed him. Their injuries were as open sores that would not heal. Take the case of McAntee. It was typica
l. Tom McAntee was one of the best puddlers in the world. On a very hot day at the puddling furnace, in the midst of a heat, with six hundred weight of good iron bubbling like gravy, turning waxy and almost ready to be drawn, Tom dropped the beater he was working it with, wobbled a bit, put his hand to his head, and said he guessed he’d have to knock off and go home. Enoch, who watched every heat, was standing there. He called Tom’s assistant to take up the beater and then without a word he handed Tom a blue ticket. The significance of the blue ticket was this: A man in Gib’s mill had three chances with failure,—that is, he was entitled to three dismissals. The first was a yellow ticket. That was a rebuke. After three days he could come back to his job. The second dismissal was with a red ticket. That was a warning. It meant two weeks off. Then he might try again. But the third time it was a blue ticket, and that was final. He could never come back. So McAntee was fired for good, and this was without precedent under the rules because that was the first ticket he had ever got. The next day Enoch sent a clerk to McAntee’s house with Tom’s wages. A widow received them. Tom was dead.

  The man who picked up Tom’s beater and went on with the heat that day, all the men of the puddling and heating crews, every man in the mill, even the miners back in the mountains,—they were all white with rage and horror, yet not one of them fumbled a stroke of labor, or quit, or thought of quitting. The effect of this incident, in fact, was to lift the breaking point through the whole organization. Those who had already had yellow and red tickets went on for years and died without ever getting a blue one. Many were dismissed. Almost never did a man quit. Why? Because, more than anything else in the world they feared Enoch Gib’s contempt for the man who broke. They could stand his cruelty; they could not bear his scorn. Also, in a strange way, the men themselves shared his contempt for the one who broke. They would not acknowledge it; they tried hard to conceal it. Yet a man could not quit without feeling inferior, not only in the sight of the tyrant but in the eyes of his fellow workers.