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. Ther............