Aaron Breakspeare, grandson of the founder, and Enoch, son of Christopher Gib, being of the same age, inheriting parallel estates in a town realized from a joint impulse of their forbears, grew up together. They were never friends. They were rivals, unable to conceal or control their rivalry, the essence of which was antagonism. But they were inseparable. They could not let each other alone. Enoch was the stronger physically. In their earliest games and contests his object was to make Aaron say, “I quit.” And Aaron would sooner die than say it. In this strife Enoch had always the advantage of a definite, aggressive purpose. He created the occasions. Instinctively he knew that the way to save oneself in a trial of endurance is to keep one’s mind not on one’s own discomfort but on the agony of one’s adversary. Aaron’s power was of pride and spirit. He would never say quit, no matter how much it hurt to go on, and when he was beaten he did not complain. Once Enoch invented a way of locking their arms so as to exert a mutual and very painful torsional leverage, perhaps enough to break the bones. The game was that each should go as far as the other could stand it. All the other had to do was to say enough. It was[19] fairly played. But the word was never uttered and Aaron went home with a broken arm.
The imponderable values of life,—admiration, sympathy, sudden friendships, understanding, liking and being liked,—belonged to Aaron as by right. He was that kind of being toward whom the heart yearns for no reason but its own. Men and women loved him without knowing why. The people of New Damascus spoke of him with possessive affection and worldly misgiving; he would do himself no good, they said. That means whatever you make of it.
Enoch, pretending to be contemptuous, was secretly torn with envy. People looked at him and said: “The spit image of his father.” He had many of old Christopher’s facial expressions, especially one that was unnatural and very disconcerting. Anger or any strong adverse emotion caused the face to appear to be smiling. It wasn’t; nor was the expression assumed as a mask. The effect was accidental, produced by some peculiarity in the action of the retractor muscles. He was by nature more saturnine than his father, or perhaps it was only that he more indulged the impulse to cruelty. At fifteen he was already feared by his elders for what he might say.
His character developed in a true line. The traits of his youth became only more pronounced as he grew up. To take the pride out of Aaron became almost a passion. He delighted to expose his frailties and limitations. Aaron bought a fast horse. Enoch hating horses bought a faster one and drove it to death.[20] Aaron on a dare swam the river at flood, which was thought a fine feat. Enoch swam it with his legs tied.
Aaron apparently did not mind. If he suspected the envious motive in Enoch’s conduct he never spoke of it, but generously applauded the other’s triumphs. Whatever else happened their intimacy remained unbroken. This seemed to be no more of one’s seeking than the other’s. Those of their own generation wondered, but the elders, hearing it spoken of, said it was no more strange than the way General Woolwine held with Christopher to the end of his days, though it more than half ruined him.
They went to the same school at Philadelphia. Enoch worked just hard enough to beat Aaron in everything except mathematics and popularity, and spent a great deal of his leisure prowling about the iron foundries. They fascinated him. There was iron in the blood of his family. His grandfather and great-grandfather had been smiths in England. And his father had laid upon him one injunction, which was never to part with an acre of ore or coal land, for some day these undeveloped possessions would make him rich. Then secretly he took up the study of metallurgy.
Yet it was Aaron who proposed to Enoch that they should pool their interests in ore and coal and found an iron industry at New Damascus. This fatal thing happened sometime between midnight and dawn after a disastrous twin celebration of their twenty-first birthday with a party of friends at Fingerboard Inn.
[21]
Aaron’s mood was sentimental. He felt a great twinge for Enoch, because of what occurred at the party. He himself was the one to blame. First he had demanded of his friends, when he heard what they were doing, that they should invite Enoch, too, as an equal guest; then with great difficulty, he had persuaded Enoch to come. It was bound to be dismal. Only one of Aaron’s reckless spontaneity could have imagined otherwise.
An archaic, mystical man rite survives in the panegyric supper. The root is hero worship. The impulse is exacting, jealous and sacrificial. Its chosen object, according to the rules, must submit to be clothed in the colors of perfection, set upon a pedestal and gorged with praise until he is purple. As the hero’s embarrassment rises his makers become more solemn and egregious, until suddenly with rough hands they drag their colossal effigy down and embrace it and everything, itself included, dissolves in maudlin ecstasy.
Obviously two human objects cannot be equally inflated in this manner at once. The impulse cannot divide itself. If it tried, no matter with what pains of tact, the effort would fall.
Having invited Enoch, whom they all disliked, Aaron’s friends felt acquitted toward him, and then, knowing how he hated to see Aaron preferred, they carried praise of Aaron to a point grotesque. As the wine flowed they became heedless and took delight in Enoch’s chagrin. No toast was drunk to him; his name was not mentioned. It was cruel but not premeditated.[22] He ought not to have come. Aaron was ashamed to look at him.
Enoch, from having been at first merely bored, turned hot with anger, thinking the situation had been purposely created to humiliate him. He did not suspect Aaron of conscious part in that design; he blamed him, however, for having lent himself to it unwittingly. Hitherto convivialities had depressed and disgusted him. Now in the bitterness of his heart he made a judgment concerning them, that they were utterly beneath him; and made also a resolution which endured to the end of his life. That was to accept once for all the fact of people’s dislike and turn it against them.
Was he not stronger than any of these who presumed to belittle him? One by one he passed them through a test. There was not one he could not break in any trial of mind or body. Perhaps it was for that reason they disliked him. No matter why. He did not return the feeling in kind. They were not important enough to call forth from him either dislike or hatred. They merited only his indifference. That put them in their right place. He would be indifferent to them so long as they stood out of his way. If they came in his path he would break them indifferently. His mind became cold and glittering. He no longer cared whether anyone liked him or not. But they should never be indifferent toward him. He would attend to that. They should fear him. That was it. He would rather be feared than liked.
With these self-saving thoughts he had become absent[23] and oblivious when suddenly on both sides he was nudged to rise, join hands, and sing to the hero. He rose, but instead of joining hands he rapped heavily on the table for attention. There was much surprise at this. Everyone stared at him in silence.
“Gentlemen,” he said, with the astonishing effect of a cold, sober voice, “I call your attention to an unfortunate omission. I propose that we shall drink to Aaron Breakspeare’s ancestors,—to the man but for whom there would be no New Damascus nor any one of us here present, and to the woman without whose assistance even that great pioneer would be now entirely forgotten. We shall drink, I say, to Aaron Breakspeare’s distinguished ancestors,—to Adam and Eve, if you please.”
There was a sound of embarrassed laughter. It immediately broke down. Gib was holding up his glass. His expression was sneering. He had paid them off, going just far enough to do so cleanly, yet not so far as to give actionable offence. For a long awkward moment they could not think either how to turn it back on him or redeem their own conduct from the ludicrous light in which he had placed it. Then Gearheart, who was taking law, he who afterward became a great jurist in the state, lifted his glass and spoke in a calm, judicial manner.
“Mr. Gib is right,” he said. “We regret the omission. Let us drink to Adam and Eve.”
So they did and that ended the party. Nobody disliked Gib less; everyone respected him more.
[24]
Aaron, who by this time was feeling very miserable, made a point of walking off with him. He wished to speak of what had happened. Yet what could he say that would not recognize the fact of Enoch’s humiliation? There was no way to speak tactfully of it. Still he could not let it alone.
“I’m sorry,” he said, blurting it out.
“For what?” Enoch inquired dryly.
“I’m afraid you had a wretched time. I’m to blame for getting you into it.”
“Not at all,” said Enoch. “To the contrary, I’m indebted to you for the most profitable evening of my life.”
He meant this. Those emotions of anger and mortification from which he had suffered so bitterly seemed now remote and insignificant. They had been swallowed up in a sense of deliverance. He had delivered himself from the torment of being disliked. The fact was unchanged, but he no longer cared. Therefore it had lost its right to oppress him. From this sudden birth of indifference he derived a feeling of solitary power. His mind was disenthralled. His whole outlook upon life was altered. For the first time he did not wonder whether Aaron really liked him or not, or how much, since it did not matter in the least. And also for the first time he did not dislike Aaron. His indifference included everyone, and it was sweet.
Aaron misunderstood the nature of Enoch’s placidity. He thought it a kind of sublime generosity and felt deep remorse. He would not have believed it was[25] in him to take a hurt to his pride so magnanimously. He was wrenched with a sudden desire to offer some sign or token of durable amity. So it was that as in one the well of friendship dried up in the other it overflowed.
They walked for some time in silence. On the first eminence east of the town their ways parted. There Christopher Gib had built the dark iron-stone house which was still Enoch’s home. The Woolwine mansion where Aaron lived was higher up. Enoch would have turned his way, leaving it as usual for Aaron to say goodnight; Aaron detained him by the arm.
They stood for several minutes with their faces averted, gazing alternately at the stars that were God’s, at the mountains that were theirs, and at the town beneath them, showing in silhouette against the moon-lacquered river, a dream of their forebears realized. It was a beautiful night. Their thoughts ran together. Both were stirred by a vague sense of freedom, knowledge and responsibility. Each had that day come into the possession of his estate. It was Enoch who spoke.
“What will you do with yours?” he asked.
Until this moment Aaron had never once thought what he should do with it. But at the sound of Enoch’s voice asking the question so bluntly a complete idea crystallized in his mind. It had clarity and perspective, like a vision, and sudden as it was he felt very familiar with it.
“Look, Enoch,” he said. “There is the New Damascus[26] we grew up with. How still it lies in the moonlight! How permanent it looks! Yet when we were born it was not here. Before we die it will have disappeared. In its place will be a city that shall walk out of those mountains,—a city of furnaces, full of roaring and the clangor of metal, flaming and smoking to heaven. Your father and my grandfather imagined it. They could not themselves bring it to pass. It was not for their time. They left it for us to do. We have a destiny here. Let’s take it together. Let’s form a partnership and found an iron industry.”
“That’s what I am intending to do,” said Enoch. “Not the partnership. I was not thinking of that. But the iron business,—I’ve had that in mind all the time. I’ve made a study of it.” After a pause he added: “I didn’t know your thoughts turned that way. 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.[27] Your grandfather distinctly was not. You would do better in law or politics. Still, as you say, there’s an obvious advantage in bringing all the properties together. We’ll talk about it to-morrow if you like. It’s on your initiative, remember.”
“Let’s agree on the main point now and leave the details,” said Aaron. “I’ll take my chances with business.”
He held out his hand. Enoch took it slowly. They looked at each other steadily in the moonlight.
“Is it agreed?”
“Yes,” said Enoch.
Then they said goodnight.