The Three Black Pennys Part 22

The whiskey and water shook in a tense, unsteady hand. He rose from the table with a violent relief. He proposed almost immediately that they go over to the Works, and Mariana turned pleasantly to his wife. "Shall you get a hat?" The other hesitated, then a.s.serted defiantly, "I've always said I wouldn't go into that rackety place, and I won't now. It's bad enough to have it tramped back over things." Mariana extended a hand.

"Then good-bye," she proceeded. "I think we won't get back here. We're tremendously obliged for the lunch. It has been interesting to see where Jim lives." Harriet Polder's cheeks were darker than pink as they moved out to the sidewalk. "Jim," she called, with an unmistakably proprietary sounding of the familiar diminution; "don't forget my cigarettes, and a half pound of liver for Cherette."

x.x.xI

James Polder conducted them to the river, sweeping away in a wide curve beneath solid grey stone bridges into a region of towering hills. They turned to the left, and, walking on a high embankment, pa.s.sed blocks of individually pretentious dwellings, edifices of carved granite, alternating with the simpler brick faces of an older period. A narrow, whitely dusty sweep of green park was followed by a speedy degeneration of the riverside; the houses shrunk to rows of wood marked by the grime of steel mills. Soon after they reached a forbidding fence; and, pa.s.sing a watchman's inspection, entered into a clamorous region of sheds, tracks and confusing levels such as Howat Penny had viewed from the train.

"I'm in the open hearth," Polder told them, leading the way over a narrow boardwalk, still skirting the broad expanse of the river. "It's a process, really, but the whole mill is called after it. We make steel from iron sc.r.a.p; that's our specialty in the Medial Works; and our stuff's as good as the best. The bigger concerns mostly use pig. Turn in here." They were facing the towering end of an iron shed, and mounted a steep ascent to gain the upper entrance. The multiplication of noises beat in an increasing volume about Howat Penny. Below him a locomotive screeched with a freight of slag; beyond was a heap of ma.s.sive, broken moulds; and a train of small trucks held empty iron boxes beside an enormous bank of iron sc.r.a.p dominated by a huge crane swinging a circular magnet that dispa.s.sionately picked up ton loads and bore them to the waiting cars.

Inside he gazed through a long vista under a roof lost in tenebrious shadow. On one side were ranged the furnaces, a continuous bank of brick bound in iron; each furnace with five doors, closed with black slides in which a round opening emitted an intolerable, dazzling white glare. But few men, Howat thought, were visible in proportion to the magnitude of the work; deliberately engaged, with leather shields hanging from their wrists and blue spectacles pushed up on their grimy brows.

A crane advanced with the shrill racket of an electric gong, its operator caged in midair, and herculean grappling chains swinging. A grinding truck, filling the width of floor, moved forward to where Howat stood. It was, Polder told him, the charging machine. An iron beam projected opposite the furnace doors, and it was locked into one of the charging boxes, filled with sc.r.a.p metal, standing on the rails against the furnaces. A man behind him dragged forward a lever, the slide which covered a door rose ponderously on a blinding, incandescent core, and the beam thrust forward into the blaze, turning round and round in the emptying of the box. It was withdrawn, the slide dropped, and the machine retreated, its complex movements controlled by a single engineer at crackling switches where the power leaped in points of light like violets.

At another furnace, an opened door, where the heat poured out in a constricting blast, workmen were shovelling in powdery white stone; moving up with their heads averted, and quickly retreating with shielding arms. "That's dolomite," James Polder's explanations went rapidly forward. "They are banking up the furnace. The other, in the bins, is ferro manganese." He procured a pair of spectacles; and, with a protected gaze, Howat looked into a furnace, an appalling s.p.a.ce of apparently bubbling milk over which played sheets of ignited gases. The skin on his forehead shrivelled like scorching paper.

"I particularly wanted you to see a heat tapped," Polder told Mariana.

"And they're making a test at number four." They followed him to where a small ladle of metal had been dipped out of a furnace. It was poured, with a red-gold shower of sparks, into a mould, then dropped in a trough of water. The miniature ingot, broken under the wide sweep of a sledge, was examined by a lean, grizzled workman--"the melter"--who nodded. "We must get back of the furnace," Polder continued, indicating a narrow opening between brick walls through the unstopped c.h.i.n.ks of which seethed the scorifying blaze.

Howat Penny stood at a railing, looking down into an apparent confusion of slag and cars, pits and gigantic ladles and upright moulds set upon circular bases. A crane rumbled forward, grappled a hundred-ton ladle, a fabulous iron pot, and petulantly deposited it under a channel extending out from the base of the furnace where they had been stationed. A workman steadied himself below their level and picked with a long iron bar at a plugged opening. It was, James Polder went on, the most dangerous moment of the process--"sometimes the furnace blows out." The labour of tapping was prolonged until Howat was conscious of an oppressive tension. Workmen had gathered, waiting, in the pit. More appeared along the railing above. This was, he felt, the supreme, the dramatic, height of steel making. The men suddenly seemed puny, insignificant, before the stupendous, volcanic energy they had evoked.

The tapping stopped. Polder commenced, "It will be rammed out from the front--"

A stunning white flare filled the far roof with a dazzling illumination; and, in a dull explosion, a terrific billowing of heat, a cataract of liquid steel burst out through lambent orange and blue flames. It poured, searing the vision, into the ladle, over which rosy clouds acc.u.mulated in a bank drifting through the great s.p.a.ce of the shed.

Nothing, Howat thought, could contain, control, the appalling expansion, the furious volume, of seething white metal. He was obliged to turn away, blinded by sheets of complementary green hanging before his eyes.

The uproar subsided, the flooding steel became bluer, a solid stream curving into the black depths of the ladle. Vapours of green and sulphur and lilac shivered into the denser ruby smoke and rising silver spray.

Polder called a warning into Mariana's ear, they drew back as a lump of coal was heaved up from the pit, into the ladle. A dull vermilion blaze followed, and Howat Penny partly heard an explanation--"recarburizing."

He could now see the steel bubbling up to the rim of the container. Men, Polder said shortly, had fallen in.... Utterly unthinkable. With a sudorific heat that drove them still farther back the slag boiling on the steel flowed in a gold cascade over a great lip into a second receptacle below. That was soon filled, and gorgeous streams and pools widened across the riven ground. The steel itself escaped in a milky incandescence. "A wild heat," James Polder told them, pleased. "The bottom of a furnace may drop out. I was almost caught in the pit at Cambria." The crane chains swung forward, picked up the ladle of molten metal, and shifted it through the air to a position over a circular group of moulds. There, a valve opened, the steel poured into a central pipe. "Bottom-filled," Polder concluded, a.s.sisting Mariana over the precarious flooring; "the metal rises into the ingot forms."

They descended again, by the blackened brick, box-like office of the superintendent, to the level of the pit, retraced the way over the boardwalk. They pa.s.sed a cavernous interior, filled with a continuous crashing, where a great sheet of flushing steel was propelled over a system of rollers through a black, dripping compression. "I can take you to the Senate," James Polder told them, once more outside; "or the Engineers' Society. Dinner will be ready at the club."

He conducted them into the serious interior of a large, solidly constructed dwelling that had been transformed into a club. The dining room was already filling but they secured a small table against the wall. Across the floor ten or twelve men were gathered in a circle.

Some, Howat thought, were surprisingly young for the evident authority in their manner, p.r.o.nouncements; others were grey, weatherworn, men with immobile faces often lost, in the middle of a gay period, in a sudden gravity of thought, silent calculation. He saw the smooth, deft hands of draughtsmen, and scarred, powerful hands that, like James Polder's, had laboured through apprenticeship in pit and mill shop.

He recognized that Polder was more drawn than he had first observed. He was sapped by the crushing ent.i.ty of the steel works, the enormous heat and energy and strain of the open hearth. If the younger did not lay off he would, unquestionably, break. Nevertheless, Howat was totally unprepared for the amazing suggestion quietly advanced by Mariana.

"Jimmy," she said, "couldn't you come to Shadrach for those two weeks?

You'd find the quiet there wonderful. And any doctor will advise you to leave your family for a proper rest. I'm certain Howat would be as nice as possible."

A sudden, patent longing leaped to James Polder's countenance. Actually he stuttered with a surprised delight. d.a.m.n it, there was nothing for him, Howat, to do but stare like a helpless idiot. He ought to say something, second Mariana's impudent invitation, at once. She ignored him, gazing intently at the younger man. He, too, meeting Mariana's eyes, had apparently totally forgot the unimportant presence of Howat Penny. And he had been married to his Harriet for a scant half year!

Howat Penny thought mechanically of the Polders' depressing house, the odours of old cooking and cheap cigarettes, the feverish yapping of the silky animal, Cherette, with matted, pinkish eyes. The precipitant, prideful, young fool! Why hadn't he held onto the merest memory, the most distant chance in the world, of Mariana, rather than fling himself, his injured self-opinion, into this stew?

"Don't say it can't be managed," she persisted. "Anything may. It's absolutely necessary; you can get a prescription--two weeks of green valley and robins and country eggs. Howat will take your money from you at penny sniff, and I'll--I'll come out for dinner."

"Harriet thought of going back to the family," he replied; "but it might--" he turned at last to Howat Penny. "Would you have me?" he asked directly. What, in thunder, choice of reply did he have? Howat couldn't point out the shamelessness of such an arrangement. Harriet, it seemed, was not to be considered; just as if she were a merely disinterested connection. He issued a belated period to the effect that Shadrach was s.p.a.cious and Rudolph a capable attendant. It was, he saw, sufficient.

"We can write," said Mariana. She endeavoured to caress Howat's hand, but he indignantly frustrated her.

"I'll have to get back to the hearth," James Polder announced regretfully. "It's been wonderful," he told Mariana Jannan. Howat sc.r.a.ped his chair at the baldness of Polder's pleasure. "Your work is tremendous, Jim," she replied; "the only stirring thing I have ever known in a particularly silly world. But you mustn't let it run you, too, into steel rails. President Polder," she smiled brilliantly at him.

"Why not?" queried James, the sanguine, at once defiant, haggard and intense.

x.x.xII

The following day Howat Penny was both weary and irritable. Mariana declared, remorsefully, that she had selfishly dragged him away from Shadrach; and proposed countless trivial amends, which he fretfully blocked. He had no intention of affording her such a ready escape from a sense, he hoped, of error and responsibility. Before dinner, however, he found himself walking with her over the deep green sod that reached to the public road below. A mock orange hedge enclosed his lawn, bounding the cross roads, the upper course leading to Myrtle Forge; and beyond they pa.s.sed, on the left, the collapsed stone walls and fallen shingles of what, evidently, had been a small blacksmith's shed. Farther along they came to the st.u.r.dy sh.e.l.l of an old, single-room building, erected, perhaps, when Shadrach Furnace was new, with weeds climbing through the rotten floor, and a fragment of steps, rising to the mouldering peak of a loft, still clinging to a wall.

Without definite purpose they turned from the public way into an overgrown path, banked with matted blackberry bushes, and were soon facing the remains of the Furnace. It had been solidly constructed of unmasoned stone, bound by iron rods, and its bulk was largely unaffected by time. The hearth had fallen in, choked by luxuriant greenery; but the blank sides mounted to meet the walled path reaching out to its top from the abrupt hill against which it had been placed. Before it foundations could still be traced; and above, a rectangle of windowless stone walls survived, roofless and desolate. An abandoned road turned up the hill, and they followed it to where they could gaze into the upper ruin and the Furnace top below. Everywhere nature had marked or twisted aside cut stone and wood with its living greenery. Farther down a pathlike level followed the side of the hill, ending abruptly in a walled fall, and a confusion of broken beams, iron braces, and section of a large, wheel-like circ.u.mference. Out beyond were other crumbling remains of old activity--a stone span across the dried course of a water way, and a wide bank, showing through a hardy vegetation the grey-brown inequalities of slag.

The stillness, broken only by the querulous melody of a robin, and a beginning, faint piping of frogs, was amazingly profound after the roaring energy of the Medial Works. The decay of Shadrach Furnace showed absolute against the crashing miles of industry on the broad river. A breath of honeysuckle lifted to Howat Penny; the sky was primrose.

Mariana moved closer to him and took his arm. They said nothing.

A warm light was spilling across the darkening gra.s.s from the lower windows of his dwelling, blurring in a dusk under the high leaf.a.ge of aged maples. The white roses were already in bud on the vine climbing the lattices at his door, and Mariana fixed one in his b.u.t.tonhole.

"Howat," she said, "it isn't as if you were doing it just for Jim, but for a man, any man, really sick. I'll not even ask you to think of it for me. He can sit on the porch and converse with your owls, and poke about over the hills."

Howat considered the advisability of attempting to extract a promise from her that she would stay away from Shadrach if James Polder was there. He considered it--very momentarily. The possibility, he a.s.serted to himself, was without any alleviating circ.u.mstance. What, in heaven's name, would Charlotte think if, as it well might, the knowledge came to her that Mariana and a Polder--that name she never repeated--a married Polder without his wife, were poking over the hills together at Shadrach? She would have him, Howat, examined for lunacy. Mariana demanded too much. He told her this with the dessert.

"It's only the commonest charity," she repeated. Her attack rapidly veered. "Howat," she asked, "do you really dislike Jimmy?" Certainly, he a.s.serted, he--he disapproved of him ... altogether. A headstrong young donkey who had made a shocking mess of his life. He would have to make the best of a bad affair for which no one was to blame but himself. "It is terrific," she agreed, almost cheerfully; and he had a vague sense of having, somehow, delivered himself into her hands. "Perhaps something can still be done," she said, frowning, increasing the dangers of his position. He managed, by a stubborn silence, to check further conversation in that direction; hoping, vainly, that James Polder couldn't come, that Harriet, sensibly, would insist on his accompanying her, or that Byron would solemnly intervene.

Mariana, later displaying a letter, dispelled his wishes. "It's been arranged quite easily," she told him. "Harriet will go home. I'd like to be here when he arrives, but I can't. You'll be a dear, Howat, won't you?" she begged. "I'm certain James will give you no trouble. And do send him to bed early." At this he grew satirical, and she laughed in an unaccustomed, nervous manner that upset him surprisingly. Honduras drove her to the station the next morning; and, three days later, deposited James Polder on the worn stone threshold under the climbing rose.

After dinner the younger man faced him squarely across the apricot glow of the lamp in the middle room. "This is the third time I've come here without an invitation from you," he said directly. "It was Mariana this last. I shut my mouth on what I'd once have crammed down your throat, and came like any puppy. It wasn't on account of my health, there are miles of quiet country; it wasn't--" he hesitated, then went on--"altogether because of Mariana. I wanted to watch you closer; I want to find out what you are like inside, so I might understand some--some other things better. I can get out if it's a rank failure."

Howat issued a polite, general dissent. "Now, right there," Polder stated; "you don't want me; you'd rather I was a thousand miles away, dead. Well--why don't you say so?" He had not the least conception of a decent reticence of address, Howat Penny thought, resentfully, at the discomfort aroused by the young man's sharp attack.

"Certain amenities," he observed coldly, "have been accepted as desirable, as obligations for--" he hesitated, casting about for a phrase that would not too conspicuously exclude James Polder. "Say it,"

the latter burst out rudely, "gentlemen. And you all stand about with one thing to say and another in your head."

"A degree of perception is always admirable," Howat Penny instructed him. "That's a nasty one," Polder acknowledged; "but I got into it myself. I can see that." His hand, seared with labour, was pressed on the table; and the elder realized that, since he had witnessed a heat tapped, he was not so censorious of the broken nails, the lines of indelible black. He caught James Polder's gaze, and turned from its intense questioning. Young cheeks had no business to be so gaunt.

Polder picked up the figurine in red clay, studied it with a troubled brow, and replaced it with a gesture of hopelessness. "Possibly," Howat Penny unexpectedly remarked, "possibly you find beauty in a piece of open hearth steel."

"It's useful," Polder declared; "it has a tensile strength. I know what it will do. This," he indicated the fragment of a grace razed over twenty-three hundred years before, "is good for nothing that I see."

Now, Howat told himself, it was merely a question of tensile strength.

His old enthusiasms, his pa.s.sionate admiration for the operas of Christopher Gluck, the enthusiasms and admirations of his kind, were being pushed aside for things of more obvious practicality. The very term that had distinguished his world, men of breeding, had been discarded. Individuals like James Polder, blunt of speech, contemptuous, labour scarred, were paramount to-day.

His thoughts, he realized, were a part of the questioning thrust on him by the intrusion of Mariana's unfortunate affair into his old age. She was always dragging him to a perplexing spectacle for which he had neither energy nor inclination. But he'd be d.a.m.ned if he would allow the importunities of the young man beyond the table to complicate further his difficulties, and he retired abruptly behind the _Sat.u.r.day Review_.

"You'd better get along up," he said brusquely, after a little.

Breakfast at an end, they settled into a not uncomfortable, mutual silence. They smoked; James Polder unfolded newspapers which he neglected to read; Howat went through the periodicals with audible expressions of displeasure. He wondered when Mariana would appear.

Mariana made a fool of him, that was evident; however, he would put his foot on any philandering about Shadrach. He could be as blunt as James Polder when the occasion demanded. After lunch the latter fell asleep in his chair on the porch, pallidly insensible of the sparkling flood of afternoon. Howat rose and went into the house. It was indecent to see a countenance so wearily unguarded, shorn of all protective aggression.

Mariana walked in unannounced.

"Why didn't you telephone for Honduras?" he complained. "Always some infernal difference in what you do." She frowned. "Suddenly," she admitted, "I wasn't in a hurry to get here. I almost went back.

Idiotic."

"Sensible, it seems to me," he commented. "That Polder is asleep on the porch." She nodded, "Splendid. And you needn't try to look fierce. I can see through you and out the back." He lit a cigarette angrily. "Going to stay for the night?" he demanded. "Several," she replied coolly. "Three can play sniff."