The Cinder Buggy (6 page)

“Let that be understood,” he said to Esther. Then he rose from the table and departed.

Mitchell was stupefied. He looked slowly at Esther. Her face was a perfect mask.

“Do you know what it means?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“What? What?”

“It’s the only way Mr. Gib has of paying your daughter a compliment,” she said.

And now Bruno Mitchell suffered another shock. For the first time in her life Esther rose from the table and left him there.

She went to her room, sent her maid to bed, and sat for a long time perfectly still, at the core of a maelstrom, her emotions whirling and seething around her. They were her emotions. She recognized them as such. Only, they were outside of her. This had always been true. Even before she understood what it meant her mother, a stoic, began to say: “Don’t give way to your feelings. They will swallow you up. Watch them. If you can see them they cannot hurt you.” So she had watched them fearfully. To do that she had to put them outside. She had seen them grow, change and rise until they engulfed her, and then the only way she could save herself was to give them that whirling motion, which caused them to incline from her, as the waters of the whirlpool incline from the center. But it was harder and harder to keep them whirling and she dared not stop, for if she did they would swallow her up.

The spectacle became awesome and fascinating, as a maelstrom is, and there were moments when the perverse impulse to stop, surrender, cast herself headlong away, was almost irresistible. She thought of this as equivalent to suicide. And she had for a long time secretly supposed it would ultimately happen. Now she was terrified and thrilled by a premonition that it was imminent. Never had the waters been so mad, so giddy, so nearly ungovernable, so excitingly desirable.

That is all she was thinking of,—if it may be called thinking,—as she started up, drew on walking boots, took a shawl and descended the stairs. In the hallway she met her father. He looked at her with surprise.

“Are you going out?”

“For a walk,” she said.

“But Esther!... at this hour... alone. I—”

“Yes,” she said, waiting. “Do you forbid it?”

There was a note in her voice he had never heard before. She wished him to say yes, he forbade it. That was why she asked the question. And if he had said that the whirling flood would have collapsed at once. That again was all she was thinking. It was a wild, liberating thought. But instead he took a step toward her and scrutinized her face.

“Esther, what has happened to you?”

“On the eve of my wedding, for the first and last time, for an hour perhaps, I shall be Esther herself, alone,” she said.

Since the unprecedented uproar of the inclined waters had begun an hour before she had not once thought of her wedding. The word of it, as now it came to her lips, seemed strange and fantastic, and yet she had made no resolve against it.

Her father stood aside and she passed out.

Half an hour later the knocker sounded and Mitchell himself went to the door, expecting to receive Esther. There was Enoch. He asked to see her.

“She has gone for a walk,” said Mitchell. “Won’t you come in and wait? She can’t be long returning.”

Enoch hesitated and turned away, saying he might have the good luck to meet her.

He had come to mend the impression he was conscious of having left behind him. At least that was the ostensible reason. That was what he would have said. The fact was that the adder had suddenly slunk away, and once more came that feeling for Esther which was so new and irrational and caused his heart to stagger back and forth. It was stronger than before,—stronger than pride. He could scarcely breathe for the ache of wanting to see her again that night....

Esther turned first toward the river path, changed her direction aimlessly, walked for some distance toward the limestone quarry, then suddenly swung around, passed the blast furnaces, and presently, only her feet aware of how they came there, she was high on the mountain path to Throne Rock. She had been walking too fast. Her breath began to fail. She sat on a log to rest. The moon came up. The log was the same fallen tree trunk on which she sat with her dogwood flowers the day Aaron turned round, came back, and invited her to a farewell dinner party. She knew it all the time. The scene restored itself, with all the feelings it had evoked, and she did not push them back. They detached themselves from the whirling mass and touched her. There was a moment in which she could not remember anything that had happened since; and in that moment, as an integral part of it, the figure of Aaron appeared, walking toward her from above, exactly as before.

She sat so still he might almost have passed her. He did not start. For a long time he stood looking at her. She did not move. He could not see her face. Then without speaking he sat beside her, at a little distance, on the log. The tree frogs informed on one another—
peep-ing
—
peep-ing.
A dry twig falling made a crashing sound. Far away below, at regular intervals, shrill whistle blasts denoted stages in the ring of smelting alchemies.

Aaron spoke.

“What day is tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” said Esther.

They were silent until the whistle blew again.

“At ten o’clock,” said Aaron.

“At ten o’clock,” said Esther.

The exchange of wordless thoughts went on and on, and Aaron was expecting what she said.

“I do not love him.”

“He loves you,” said Aaron.

“Does that so much oblige the woman?” Esther asked.

“The woman is obliged,” he said, “she is... unless——” He stopped.

“Aaron,” she said, “tell me this. How do friends regard each other’s wives and sweethearts?”

“Sweethearts almost the same as wives,” he said.

“So that if one loved the sweetheart of a friend he could not tell her that?”

“No, he could not.”

“Not even if he knew the sweetheart did not love the friend?”

“No,” said Aaron.

“Then should the woman tell?”

“Tell whom?” asked Aaron, trembling.

“The friend... the other man,” said Esther.

Aaron slowly dropped his head between his hands. She could feel his body shake. A roaring blackness filled her eyes. She rose and would have gone, but he enfolded her, with arms that touched her lightly, almost not at all at first, then tightened, tightened, tightened, until her life was crushed to his, and all the waters fell.

He put her off at arm’s length to see her better.

“Through all consequences... forever... to finality,” he said.

And she was satisfied.

How long they stood so, either thus or as it was, gazing one upon the other, with no words to say,—how long they never knew. A sound of footsteps very near broke their ecstasy, and there stood Enoch.

They had no sense of guilt. They were shy and startled from the shock of coming back to earth.

Enoch stood there looking at them. Aaron moved, drawing Esther’s form behind him.

At that Enoch turned away and laughed.

Twenty paces on his way he laughed again.

When he was out of sight he laughed.

At intervals all the way down the mountain he stopped to laugh.

The sound of his laughter reverberated, echoed, swirled, went and returned, filled the whole valley, blasting the night. Then when he was far off he uttered a piercing scream. It rose on the air like a rocket, hissed, burst with a soft splash and pitched off into space, and the world for a moment was deathly still. The tree frogs were the first to recover and began frantically to fill up the void.

Aaron touched Esther. They descended. She inquired of him nothing; he informed her of nothing. They did not speak again for hours. They walked to the Woolwine mansion. He called for horses, a light vehicle, and wraps. And all that night they drove, past the setting moon, into the darkness, through the dawn, toward Wilkes-Barre.

Next day at noon they were married.

T
HE partnership of Gib and Breakspeare was sundered.

Two weeks later, when Aaron returned to the little red office building across the road from the mill, he found on his desk a paper marked “Articles of Dissolution.” Attached was a note of two lines from Enoch, saying: “Let any changes proposed to be made herein appear in the form of writing, or through an attorney at law.”

They never spoke again.

The articles prepared by Enoch provided that the ore and coal lands, which had been pooled on a royalty basis, should release from that agreement and revert to their respective owners; that the eight blast furnaces should be divided equally, four and four; that Gib should buy from Breakspeare, for cash, his interest in the rolling mill, because it could not be divided, the price to be one-half the original cost, according to the books, and that all the money in the firm’s treasury, less current liabilities, should be halved on the date of signature.

Aaron read the paper once through, put it down and signed it. The terms were unfair. Yet he had no impulse to change them. They were unfair because nothing was made of those two intangible assets which sometimes in business are worth more than the physical properties—namely, spirit of organization and good will of trade—all of which would automatically belong to the one who bought out the other’s interest in the mill. This was so because the mill was now the crown of the business. What the firm sold was no longer pig iron, as at first, but wrought iron in standard bars manufactured from the pig by remelting, kneading, hammering and rolling it. The product of the blast furnaces, instead of going to market, only fed the mill.

What would Aaron do?

He could not sell the product of his blast furnaces to Enoch. Business transactions between them were unimaginable; besides, no sooner were the articles of dissolution signed than Enoch went about building four more blast furnaces of his own. That was to make himself independent of Aaron’s product. Aaron, therefore, might choose between seeking a market outside for his pig iron or building a mill to work it. To build a mill would require, first, a large outlay of capital, then an organization of expert workers and superintendents, and thirdly a market for his wrought iron in competition with the product of the established mill, now Enoch’s. For of course Enoch’s iron would continue to be called Damascus Iron, which was its trade name, and it was already famous in the country for its fine texture and purity. Aaron’s might be just as good, but it would have to take a new name and earn its own good will.

Well, but what he did was unexpected. He drew the fires from his blast furnaces and went to Europe with Esther.

It was more than a honeymoon, or less, as you may happen to think. 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. Who knows but the Gods are as much puzzled by that form of glow worm full of parasites that we call a railroad train as we are by the things of cosmic origin?

Specifically Aaron was in quest of a secret that had eluded and baffled iron masters always. They were sure it existed. That certainty was deducible from the data of knowledge. Many times they had almost touched it; then it was lost again, like a coy, tantalizing vision of loveliness, and the pursuers were discouraged. Still, they never gave up. Whoever found it would be made exceedingly rich and the iron industry at the same time would be revolutionized.

It is to be explained.

Everybody probably knows that in the first place all the iron was trapped in the blazing heart of the earth. It forms no part anywhere of the earth’s true granite crust. But it was rebellious and indigestible and had to be spewed up from the inflamed Plutonic belly through the tops of volcanoes. At that time volcanoes were near or under water generally, and when the molten iron came jetting forth in red lava streams a spectacular melodrama was enacted. Water was its adverse element. At the lava’s touch the oceans boiled, hissed, upheaved and draped themselves in steam. They were not hurt really; they were outraged.

What happened to the lava?

The water shivered it to atoms and cast it high upon the wind as dust and ashes.

In that free and irresponsible condition iron travelled far, made his bed in many places, took up with new and strange affinities,—the flapper sisters Chlorine, the Sulphur Gerties, the lazy Nitrate Susans, the harmless Silicates, a score of others known and unknown, and most of all with a comfortable, indispensable element called Oxygen. The extent and variety of his embracings may be imagined from the fact that he is never found in a state of unattached purity save now and then when he falls from the heavens as a meteorite. In these haphazard, bigamous earthly alliances he is of no avail to man. The problem is how to disentangle him,—how to divorce him from his undesirable affinities and wed him durably and in a lawful manner to those elements which supplement his power.

It becomes extremely complicated when you begin seriously to consider it. How shall one be divorced from many miscellaneous affinities? You have to have been regularly wedded in order to get divorced. Well, the only way is the long, pragmatic way. You wed him to the affinities that are to be legally got rid of and then divorce him from them.

Now take it: The iron ore is in the ore bed, embracing those other elements at random, particularly Oxygen. First you oxidize him by roasting. That is, you wed him to Oxygen; you give him Oxygen until he is sick of it. Then you melt him down with coal in a furnace to deoxidize him—to divorce him, that is to say, from his affinity Oxygen. It is the first fiery ordeal. But at the same time you wed him to Carbon. Thus deoxidized and carbonized, divorced and wedded by one stroke, he becomes pig iron.