The Cinder Buggy (2 page)

“This and that. No two alike.”

“S’what I thought,” he says. “I couldn’t agree with them. There’s men in this town, merchants, mind you—well, you wouldn’t believe it. There’s not ten business men in this town been as far away as Philadelphia. I know what I’m saying. I won’t mention any names, but I happen to know the president of the biggest bank in town was never in New York City.”

“Is that what’s the matter?”

“Now wait,” he says. “You see the kind of place I got here. No profanity. Nothing at all. I know the boys that come here every night. Iron workers you might say, but they’re gentlemen, in a way of speaking. They play billiards, smoke, talk. Not one of them under thirty. Went to school with most of them. Their fathers was born here like mine. And they don’t get treated right. Now I’m telling you. They’re the best iron men in the country, bar none, and they don’t get treated right.”

“So that’s it?”

“No, that ain’t it either. I’m just telling you some of the things that’s wrong with this place. You asked me the straight question, didn’t you?”

At this point he gives you a piercing look. Are you also a man of the world? He seems to doubt it. You may be one of those people who go around talking just for the excitement of it.

It is necessary to remind him that he was apparently coming to something else,—to the point, perhaps. He waits for you to do so. Then with an air of extreme asperity, meaning that you shall get all you came for, he clears the top of the showcase and leans at you with his bristles raised, looking first toward the back room, which is empty, then towards the street, which is clear, and lastly at you in a pugnacious way.

“You asked me, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you happen to believe in any of them unnatural things?”

“Such as what”

“Such as hants and spells?”

“More or less.”

“All right,” he says. “Now neighbor, take it or leave it. Suit yourself. I’ve seen my share of this world and I know what I’m talking about. That’s what’s the matter with this place.”

“What?”

“What I’m telling you, and I’m going to die here. There’s a spell on it. Nobody can help it. There’s a spell on it. Now that’s all.”

“Who put it on?”

“Oh, well, n-o-w,” he says, becoming irresponsible. “That’s different. That’s very different again. I’m not telling you anything I don’t know. Who put it on? I tell you frankly I don’t know. Maybe you’ll be smart enough to find that out. To speak the truth, I don’t know as it’s anything I want to meddle with.”

There is a difference, you see, between a banker and a tobacconist. A tobacconist believes more than he knows and tells things that ought not to be so.

Still, there is the fact. New Damascus, having cradled the metallurgical industry, ought to have grown up with it and simply did not. A town that rolled the first American rails smaller now than it was fifty years ago! Why? If it had died you could understand that. But it is not dead. Its health is apparently perfect. There is not a sore spot on its body. It functions in a kind of somnambulistic manner. The last thing you hear as you fall asleep at the old Lycoming House is the throb of its heart. That is the great engine of the Susquehanna Iron Works, muttering—

Wrought iron

Wrought iron

Wrought iron

It never stops.

W
HEN in 1879 Gen. Aaron Z. Woolwine founded this place all the best Palestinian names, such as Philadelphia, Lebanon and Bethlehem, were already taken in Pennsylvania, so he called it New Damascus; and this name when he thought of it was perfect. The Damascenes were famous artificers in metal. He imagined even a geographical resemblance,—a plain bounded on one side by a river and on the other three by mountains representing the heights of Anti-Lebanon.

He resolved a city and that its character should be Presbyterian, and entered in his diary a prophecy. With ore, coal and limestone in Providential propinquity, with a river for its commerce to walk upon and with that spirit of industry which he purposed to teach and exemplify, aye, if necessary to require, New Damascus should wax in the sight of the Lord, partake of happiness and develop a paying trade.

Besides capital and imagination he brought to this undertaking a partner, three sons and a new wife.

For thirty years he fathered New Damascus. He saw it become the most important point of trade between Philadelphia and Wilkes-Barre, with five notable inns, two general supply stores, three tanneries, six grist mills, two lumber mills and the finest Presbyterian conventicle in that part of the state. The river was a disappointment. It was high and swift in flood and very low in the dry season, all very well for lumbering and seasonal traffic, but not a true servant of steady commerce. To bring the canal to New Damascus he entered politics and continuously thereafter represented his county in the legislature. He did not live to see the rise of the iron industry. That was left to the wonder of the next generation.

One of the disasters of his old age was with stone coal, the name by which anthracite was first known. All the coal around New Damascus was anthracite. For all that could be made of it commercially it might as well have been slate or shale. Nobody knew how to burn it. The fuel of industry was soft coal, which ignites easily; and wood was burned in open grates, not in New Damascus only but everywhere at this time; and as anthracite or hard coal would not burn in the same furnace and grates that burned either soft coal or wood people were sure it would not burn at all. General Woolwine knew better. Wherever he went he carried with him samples of hard coal, even in his saddle bags, begging people to try it, but the notion against it was too strong to be overcome by propaganda. Only time and accident could do that. Once he freighted a large quantity to Philadelphia, resolved to make it burn in some of the large forges there. The result was a dismal failure. Others before him on the same crazy errand had been arrested for obtaining money under false pretences, selling black stone as coal, and the prejudice was irreducible. He abandoned the stuff in Philadelphia; it was broken up and spread in walks. Later,—too late to benefit him,—the secret of burning anthracite in furnaces was discovered by accident. A perverse foundryman, who believed less in hard coal than in the probability that what everybody disbelieved was for that reason true, spent a whole day trying to make a fire of it. Then he left it in disgust and went home to supper. Returning some hours later he found an amazing fire,—hotter than any soft coal fire he had ever seen. The secret, beyond having a strong draught, was to let it alone. In a little while everybody was saying that you could burn stone coal if only you let it alone. That simple bit of knowledge, derived from trial and error, was worth more to Pennsylvania than a thousand gold mines.

In the last few years of his life General Woolwine, by his efforts to exploit stone coal and in various schemes of the imagination, lost a considerable part of his fortune by not attending to it. He was not a sound man of business in that sense. Ideas obsessed him. The idea that stone coal would burn was an obsession on which he made large outlays of time and money. He pursued the idea to failure. A more practical man would have first invented a grate suited to the fuel. A more conservative, selfish man would have sat on his anthracite beds until someone else had invented a grate. Yet he was never discouraged. The day before he died he wrote in his diary:

“As I lay down this life I am moved to reflect on its beauty and fulness to me. I have used up my strength in works. Nothing have I withheld from the Lord. I have walked in the faith. I have imagined civilization in a wilderness. Then I have seen it with my eyes.”

That was all he said of New Damascus. Other memories crowded in.

“In 1774,” he wrote, “I married a pious, sensible woman, who bore me two sons. In 1781 I married an eminent, worthy woman, who bore me a third son. In 1788 I married a delightful, affectionate woman, whom God was pleased to spare me to the end. She bore me my one daughter, Rebecca.”

The two sons by the first wife were already dead. This he did not mention in his testimony. The third son, born of the eminent and worthy woman, was at this time thirty-seven and unmarried, unlikely to perpetuate the line or to grace it if he did. All the Woolwine vitality went into Rebecca, born of his union with the delightful affectionate woman. Rebecca had married Phineas Breakspeare, the inn keeper, and was for a long time estranged from her father on that account. He forgave her on the head of a grandson, his namesake, Aaron Breakspeare.

The founder’s affairs were left in a somewhat involved condition. Everyone was surprised that the estate was not greater. His partner had large claims upon it and the accounts were in confusion.

The widow survived the General but one year. The third son died the next year. The whole estate then passed to Rebecca, who had buried her inn keeper; she held it in trust for the founder’s grandson, Aaron.

Here ends the Woolwine line. The name disappears suddenly from the annals of the county.

N
OWHERE in the annals of the county nor in those lymphatic biographical histories, quarto, half or full leather, profusely illustrated with steel engravings, which adorn the bookshelves of posterity, is there any mention of General Woolwine’s partner and man of business. This was Christopher Gib, cold, and logical, with a large broad face, dull blue eyes, a long bleak mouth line and a hard apple chin. People feared him instinctively. He inspired them with dread, anxiety and a sense of injury; yet in practical matters, especially in great emergencies, he commanded their utmost confidence. Those who complained of his oppression were certain to have been weak or wrong. That made no difference,—or made it worse. In every dispute he was technically, legally, perhaps morally right. By all the rules of law his acts were blameless. Nevertheless they outraged that subtle sense of the heart, higher than the sense of right and wrong, to which human conduct is referred for ultimate judgment. He acquired his rights fairly. His way of making a bargain was to let the party of the second part propose the terms. Then he would say yes or no, and that was final. Higgling disgusted him. But having made a bargain he insisted upon it in a relentless, dispassionate manner. No one could say he was unjust. But from one who is never unjust you shall not expect generosity. Human beings do not crave justice; they accept it. What they long for is understanding through sympathy. Christopher Gib had no chemistry of sympathy. It was left out of him. Therefore he had no emotional understanding of people and people had no rational understanding of him. His tragedy was invisible. He was denied what he could not give, namely, bread of the sweetened loaf without price, for which everyone hungers. Contempt for all the sentimental aspects of life was the self-saving device of his ego. He treated people as children. The more they disliked him the more bitterly he took his due.

He was ten years younger than General Woolwine and dominated the elder man in all their joint affairs, as a rational nature may dominate a romantic one. They quarreled a great deal;—one in a low, cynical voice; the other in loud, righteous tones. These disagreements were private. Outwardly to the end they maintained an appearance of unbroken amity. As to his ideas the old founder was immovable and pursued his own way. In matters of business he would sooner yield than continue the argument. One neglected business; the other lived for it. As the Woolwine estate declined that of Gib increased. There was no inequity in this. It was inevitable. The General drew out his profits and spent them; Gib reinvested his in undertakings outside the partnership. At the beginning the coal and iron lands were divided between them in the proportions of one-third and two-thirds, according to the amounts of capital respectively invested. The one-third was Gib’s share. In the end the proportions were exactly reversed. The Woolwine estate owned one-third and Gib two-thirds. It was all perfectly correct and legal.

At the age of fifty Gib married Sarah, of the Withy family, that came from New Jersey and built the first grist mill in New Damascus. Sarah was a dutiful, reconciled woman of strong, uncomplaining fibre, who could not fold her hands until the work was done. She never understood her husband. He never understood her. It wasn’t necessary. She was thirty-five and had once loved a young man who never even suspected it.

Of this inarticulate union came one son, named Enoch, born on the same day with Aaron Breakspeare, Rebecca’s child, grandson of the founder.

Christopher Gib lived fifteen years more, growing steadily richer and more misunderstood. Then he built himself a tomb, the walls of which were three feet thick, reinforced with bar iron, and died in the night alone.

A
ARON 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 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.