M
TUBAL CAIN
THE WORKS OF
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
NOVELS
THE LAY ANTHONY [1914]
MOUNTAIN BLOOD [1915]
THE THREE BLACK PENNYS [1917]
JAVA HEAD [1918]
LINDA CONDON [1919]
CYTHEREA [1922]
THE BRIGHT SHAWL [In preparation]
SHORTER STORIES
WILD ORANGES [1918]
TUBAL CAIN [1918]
THE DARK FLEECE [1918]
THE HAPPY END [1919]
TRAVEL
SAN CRISTOBAL DE LA HABANA [1920]
NEW YORK: ALFRED A. KNOPF
TUBAL CAIN
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
NEW YORK
ALFRED'A'KNOPF
1922
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Published, April, 1918, in a volume now out of print,
entitled "Gold and Iron," and then reprinted twice.
First published separately, March, 1922
Set up, electrotvped, and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N, Y.
Paper supplied by W. F. Ether ington ,t Co., New York, N. Y.
Bound &i/ the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES Or AMERICA
TUBAL CAIN
528G35
ALEXANDER HULINGS sat at the dingy,
green-baize covered table, with one slight
knee hung loosely over the other, and his
tenuous fingers lightly gripping the time-polished
wooden arms of a hickory chair. He was staring
somberly, with an immobile, thin, dark counte
nance, at the white plaster wall before him. Close
by his right shoulder a window opened on a tran
quil street, where the vermilion maple buds were
splitting; and beyond the window a door was ajar
on a plank sidewalk. Some shelves held crumbling
yellow calf -bound volumes, a few new, with glazed
black labels; at the back was a small cannon stove,
with an elbow of pipe let into the plaster; a large
steel engraving of Chief Justice Marshall hung on
the wall; and in a farther corner a careless pile of
paper, folded in dockets or tied with casual string,
was collecting a grey film of neglect. A small
banjo clock, with a brass-railed pediment and an
elongated picture in color of the Exchange at Man
chester, traced the regular, monotonous passage of
minutes into hour.
The hour extended, doubled; but Alexander Hu-
lings barely -shifted a knee, a hand. At times a
slight convulsive shudder passed through his shoul-
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TUBAL CAIN
ders, but without affecting his position or the
concentrated gloom. Occasionally he swallowed
dryly; his grip momentarily tightened on the
chair, but his gaze was level. The afternoon
waned ; a sweet breath of flowering magnolia drifted
in at the door; the light grew tender; and footfalls
without sounded far away. Suddenly Hulings
moved : his chair scraped harshly over the bare floor
and he strode abruptly outside, where he stood fac
ing a small tin sign nailed near the door. It read:
ALEXANDER HULINGS
COUNSELOR AT LAW
With a violent gesture, unpremeditated even by
himself, he forced his hand under an edge of the
sign and ripped it from its place. Then he went
back and flung it bitterly, with a crumpling impact,
away from him, and resumed his place at the table.
It was the end of that! He had practiced law
seven, nine, years, detesting its circuitous trivialities,
uniformly failing to establish a professional success,
without realizing his utter legal unfitness. Before
him on a scrap of paper were the figures of his past
year's activities. He had made something over nine
hundred dollars. And he was thirty-four years
old! Those facts, seen together, dinned failure in
his brain. There were absolutely no indications of
a brighter future. Two other actualities added to
the gloom of his thoughts: one was Hallie Flower;
[8]
TUBAL CAIN
that would have to be encountered at once, this
evening; and the other was — his health.
He was reluctant to admit any question of the
latter; he had the feeling, almost a superstition,
that such an admission enlarged whatever, if any
thing, was the matter with him. It was vague, but
increasingly disturbing; he had described it with
difficulty to Doctor Veneada, his only intimate
among the Eastlake men, as a sensation like that a
fiddlestring might experience when tightened re
morselessly by a blundering hand.
"At any minute," he had said, "the damned thing
must go!"
Veneada had frowned out of his whiskers.
"What you need," the doctor had decided, "is a
complete change. You are strung up. Go away.
Forget the law for two or three months. The Min
eral is the place for you."
Alexander Hulings couldn't afford a month
or more at the Mineral Spring; and he had said so
with the sharpness that was one of the annoying
symptoms of his condition. He had had several
letters, though, throughout a number of years, from
James Claypole, a cousin of his mother, asking him
out to Tubal Cain, the iron forge which barely
kept Claypole alive; and he might manage that — if
it were not for Hallie Flower. There the con
versation had come to an inevitable conclusion.
Now, in a flurry of violence that was, neverthe
less, the expression of complete purpose, he had
[9]
TUBAL CAIN
ended his practice, his only livelihood; and that
would — must — end Hallie.
He had been engaged to her from the day when,
together, they had, with a pretense of formality,
opened his office in Eastlake. He had determined
not to marry until he made a thousand dollars in
a year; and, as year after year slipped by without
his accumulating that amount, their engagement had
come to resemble the unemotional contact of a union
without sex. Lately Hallie had seemed almost con
tent with duties in her parental home and the three
evenings weekly that Alexander spent with her in
the formal propriety of a front room.
His own feelings defied analysis; but it seemed to
him that, frankly surveyed, even his love for Hallie
Flower had been swallowed up in the tide of irrita
bility rising about him. He felt no active sorrow
at the knowledge that he was about to relinquish all
claim upon her; his pride stirred resentfully; the
evening promised to be uncomfortable — but that
was all.
The room swam about him in a manner that had
grown hatefully familiar; he swayed in his chair;
and his hands were at once numb with cold and
wet with perspiration. A sinking fear fastened on
him, an inchoate dread that he fought bitterly. It
wasn't death from which Alexander Hulings shud
dered, but a crawling sensation that turned his knees
to dust. He was a slight man, with narrow shoul
ders and close-swinging arms, but as rigidly erect
[10]
TUBAL CAIN
as an iron bar; his mentality was like that too, and
he particularly detested the variety of nerves that
had settled on him.
A form blocked the doorway, accentuating the
dusk that had swiftly gathered in the office, and
Veneada entered. His neckcloth was, as always,
carelessly folded, and his collar hid in rolls of
fat; a cloak was thrown back from a wide girth,
and he wore an incongruous pair of buff linen
trousers.
"What's this — mooning in the dark?" he de
manded. "Thought you hadn't locked the office
door. Come out; fill your lungs with the spring
and your stomach with supper."
Without reply, Alexander Hulings followed the
other into the street.
"I am going to Hallie's," he said in response to
Veneada's unspoken query.
Suddenly he felt that he must conclude everything
at once and get away; where and from what he
didn't know. It was not his evening to see Hallie
and she would be surprised when he came up on
the step. The Flowers had supper at five ; it would
be over now, and Hallie finished with the dishes and
free. Alexander briefly told Veneada his double
decision.
"In a way," the other said, "I'm glad. You
must get away for a little anyway; and you are
accomplishing nothing here in Eastlake. You are
a rotten lawyer, Alexander; any other man would
[in
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have quit long ago; but your infernal stubbornness
held you to it. You are not a small-town man.
You see life in a different, a wider way. And if
you could only come on something where your pig-
headedness counted there's no saying where you'd
reach. I'm sorry for Hallie; she's a nice woman,
and you could get along well enough on nine
hundred "
"I said I'd never marry until I made a thousand
in a year," Hulings broke in, exasperated.
"Good heavens! Don't I know that?" Veneada
replied. "And you won't, you — you mule! I
guess I've suffered enough from your confounded
character to know what it means when you say a
thing. I think you're right about this. Go up to
that fellow Claypole and show him what brittle
stuff iron is compared to yourself. Seriously, Alex,
get out and work like the devil at a heavy job; go
to bed with your back ruined and your hands raw.
You know I'll miss you — means a lot to me, best
friend."
A deep embarrassment was visible on Veneada;
it was communicated to Alexander Hulings, and he
was relieved when they drew opposite the Flowers'
dwelling.
It was a narrow, high brick structure, with a
portico cap, supported by cast-iron grilling, and
shallow iron-railed balconies on the second story.
A gravel path divided a small lawn beyond a gate
[12]
TUBAL CAIN
guarded by two stone greyhounds. Hallie emerged
from the house with an expression of mild inquiry
at his unexpected appearance. She was a year
older than himself, an erect, thin woman, with a
pale coloring and unstirred blue eyes.
"Why, Alex," she remarked, "whatever brought
you here on a Saturday?" They sat, without
further immediate speech, from long habit, in
familiar chairs.
He wondered how he was going to tell her. And
the question, the difficulty, roused in him an aston
ishing amount of exasperation. He regarded her
almost vindictively, with covertly shut hands. He
must get hold of himself. Hallie, to whom he was
about to do irreparable harm, the kindest woman in
existence ! But he realized that whatever feeling he
had had for her was gone for ever; she had become
merged indistinguishably into the thought of East-
lake; and every nerve in him demanded a total
separation from the slumbrous town that had wit
nessed his legal failure.
He wasn't, he knew, normal; his intention here
was reprehensible, but he was without will to defeat
it. Alexander Hulings felt the clumsy hand draw
ing tighter the string he had pictured himself as
being; an overwhelming impulse overtook him to
rush away — anywhere, immediately. He said in
a rapid blurred voice:
"Hallie, this . . . our plans are a failure.
[13]
TUBAL CAIN
That is, I am. The law's been no good; I mean,
I haven't. Can't get the hang of the — the
damned "
"Alex!" she interrupted, astonished at the exple
tive.
"I'm going away," he gabbled on, only half con
scious of his words in waves of giddy insecurity.
"Yes; for good. I'm no use here! Shot to pieces,
somehow. Forgive me. Can't get a thousand."
Hallie Flower said in a tone of unpremeditated
surprise :
"Then I'll never be married!"
She sat with her hands open in her lap, a wist-
fulness on her countenance that he found only silly.
He cursed himself, his impotence, bitterly. Now
he wanted to get away ; but there remained an almost
more impossible consummation — Hallie's parents.
They were old; she was an only child.
"Your father " he muttered.
On his feet he swayed like a pendulum. Vise-
like fingers gripped at the back of his neck. The
hand of death? Incredibly he lived through a
stammering, racking period, in the midst of which
a cuckoo ejaculated seven idiotic notes from the
fretted face of a clock.
He was on the street again; the cruel pressure
was relaxed; he drew a deep breath. In his room,
a select chamber with a "private" family, he packed
and strapped his small leather trunk. There was
nowhere among his belongings a suggestion of any
[14]
TUBAL CAIN
souvenir of the past, anything sentimental or charged
with memory. A daguerreotype of Hallie Flower,
in an embossed black case lined with red plush, he
ground into a shapeless fragment. Afterward he
was shocked by what he had done and was forced to
seek the support of a chair. He clenched his jaw,
gazed with stony eyes against the formless dread
about him.
He had forgotten that the next day was Sunday,
with a corresponding dislocation of the train and
packet service which was to take him West. A
further wait until Monday was necessary. Alex
ander Hulings got through that too ; and was finally
seated with Veneada in his light wagon, behind a
clattering pair of young Hambletonians, with the
trunk secured in the rear. Veneada was taking him
to a station on the Columbus Railroad. Though
the morning had hardly advanced, and Hulings had
wrapped himself in a heavy cape, the doctor had
only a duster, unbuttoned, on his casual clothing.
"You know, Alex," the latter said — "and let me
finish before you start to object — that I have more
money than I can use. And, though I know you
wouldn't just borrow any for cigars, if there ever
comes a time when you need a few thousands, if4
you happen on something that looks good for both
of us, don't fail to let me know. You'll pull out
of this depression; I think you're a great man,
Alex — because you are so unpleasant, if for nothing
else."
[15]
TUBAL CAIN
The doctor's weighty hand fell affectionately on
Hillings' shoulder.
Hulings involuntarily moved from the other's
contact; he wanted to leave all — all of Eastlake.
Once away, he was certain, his being would clarify,
grow more secure. He even neglected to issue a
characteristic abrupt refusal of Veneada's implied
offer of assistance; though all that he possessed,
now strapped in his wallet, was a meager provision
for a debilitated man who had cast safety behind
him.
The doctor pulled his horses in beside a small,
boxlike station, on flat wooden tracks, dominated
by a stout pole, to which was nailed a ladderlike
succession of cross blocks.
Alexander Hulings was infinitely relieved when
the other, after some last professional injunctions,
drove away. Already, he thought, he felt better;
and he watched, with a faint stirring of normal
curiosity, the station master climb the pole and sur
vey the mid-distance for the approaching train.
The engine finally rolled fussily into view, with
a lurid black column of smoke pouring from a
thin belled stack, and dragging a rocking, precari
ous brigade of chariot coaches scrolled in bright
yellow and staring blue. It stopped, with a fretful
ringing and grinding impact of coach on coach.
Alexander Hulings' trunk was shouldered to a roof;
and after an inspection of the close interiors he
followed his baggage to an open seat above. The
[16]
TUBAL CAIN
engine gathered momentum; he was jerked rudely
forward and blinded by a cloud of smoke streaked
with flaring cinders.
There was a faint cry at his back, and he saw a
woman clutching a charring hole in her crinoline.
The railroad journey was an insuperable torment;
the diminishing crash at the stops, either at a
station or where cut wood was stacked *to fire the
engine, the choking hot waves of smoke, the shouted
confabulations between the captain and the engineer,
forward on his precarious ledge — all added to an
excruciating torture of Hulings' racked and shud
dering nerves. His rigid body was thrown from
side to side; his spine seemed at the point of splin
tering from the pounding of the rails.
An utter mental dejection weighed down his
shattered being; it was not the past but the future
that oppressed him. Perhaps he was going only
to die miserably in an obscure hole; Veneada prob
ably wouldn't tell him the truth about his condition.
What he most resented, with a tenuous spark of his
customary obstinate spirit, was the thought of never
justifying a belief he possessed in his ultimate
power to conquer circumstance, to be greatly suc
cessful.
Veneada, a man without flattery, had himself
used that word "great" in connection with him.
Alexander Hulings felt dimly, even now, a
sense of cold power; a hunger for struggle different
from a petty law practice in Eastlake. He thought
[17]
TUB At CAIN
of the iron that James Claypole unsuccessfully
wrought; and something in the word, its implied
obduracy, fired his disintegrating mind. "Iron!"
Unconsciously he spoke the word aloud. He was
entirely ignorant of what, exactly, it meant, what
were the processes of its fluxing and refinement;
forge and furnace were hardly separated in his
thoughts. But out of the confusion emerged the
one concrete stubborn fact — iron!
He was drawn, at last, over a level grassy plain,
at the far edge of which evening and clustered
houses merged on a silver expanse of river. It was
Columbus, where he found the canal packets lying
in the terminal-station basin.
[18]
II
THE westbound packet, the Hit or Miss, started
with a long horn blast and the straining of
the mules at the towrope. The canal boat
slipped into its placid banked* waterway. Supper
was being laid in the gentlemen?s cabin, and Alex
ander Hulings was unable to secure a berth. The
passengers crowded at a single long table; and the
low interior, steaming with food, echoing with clat
tering china and a ceaseless gabble of voices, con
fused him intolerably. He made his way to the
open space at the rear. The soundless, placid move
ment at once soothed him and was exasperating in
its slowness. He thought of his journey as an es
cape, an emergence from a suffocating cloud; and
he raged at its deliberation.
The echoing note of a cornet- a- piston sounded
from the deck above; it was joined by the rattle of
a drum; and an energetic band swept into the strains
of Zip Coon. The passengers emerged from supper
and gathered on the main deck; the gayly lighted
windows streamed in moving yellow bars over dark
banks and fields; and they were raised or lowered
on the pouring black tide of masoned locks. If
it had not been for the infernal persistence of the
band, Alexander Hulings would have been almost
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TUBAL CAIN
comfortable; but the music, at midnight, showed no
signs of abating. Money was collected, whisky
distributed; a quadrille formed forward. Hulings
could see the women's crinolines, the great sleeves
and skirts, dipping and floating in a radiance of
oil torches. He had a place in a solid bank of
chairs about the outer rail, and sat huddled in his
cape. His misery, as usual, increased with the
night; the darkness was streaked with immaterial
flashes, disjointed visions. He was infinitely weary,
and faint from a hunger that he yet could not
satisfy. A consequential male at his side, past
middle age, with close whiskers and a mob of seals,
addressed a commonplace to him; but he made no
reply. The other regarded Hulings with an arro
gant surprise, then turned a negligent back. From
beyond came a clear, derisive peal of girlish
laughter. He heard a name — Gisela — pronounced.
Alexander Hulings' erratic thoughts returned to
iron. He wondered vaguely why James Claypole
had never succeeded with Tubal Cain. Probably,
like so many others, he was a drunkard. The man
who had addressed him moved away — he was ac
companied by a small party — and another took his
vacant place.
"See who that was?" he asked Hulings. The
latter shook his head morosely. "Well, that," the
first continued impressively, "is John Wooddrop."
Alexander Hulings had an uncertain memory of
the name, connected with
[20]
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"Yes, sir — John Wooddrop, the Ironmaster. I
reckon that man is the biggest — not only the richest
but the biggest — man in the state. Thousands of
acres, mile after mile; iron banks and furnaces and
forges and mills ; hundreds of men and women . . .
all his. Like a European monarch! Yes, sir; re
sembles that. Word's law — says 'Come here!' or
'Go there ! ' His daughter is with him too, it's
clear she's got the old boy's spirit, and his lady.
They get off at Harmony; own the valley; own
everything about."
Harmony was the place where Hulings was to
leave the canal; from there he must drive to Tubal
Cain. The vicarious boastfulness of his neighbor
stirred within him an inchoate antagonism.
"There is one place near by he doesn't own," he
stated sharply.
"Then it's no good," the other promptly replied.
"If it was, Wooddrop would have it. It would be
his or nothing — he'd see to that. His name is Me,
or nobody."
Alexander Hulings' antagonism increased and
illogically fastened on the Ironmaster. The other's
character, as it had been stated, was precisely the
quality that called to the surface his own stubborn
will of self-assertion. It precipitated a condition
in which he expanded, grew determined, ruthless,
cold.
He imagined himself, sick and almost moneyless
and bound for Claypole's failure, opposed to John
[21]
TUBAL CAIN
Wooddrop, and got a faint thrill from the fantastic
vision. He had a recurrence of the conviction that
he, too, was a strong man; and it tormented him
with the bitter contrast between such an image and
his actual present self. He laughed aloud, a thin,
shaken giggle, at his belief persisting in the face of
such irrefutable proof of his failure. Neverthe
less, it was firmly lodged in him, like a thorn prick
ing at his dissolution, gathering his scattered
faculties into efforts of angry contempt at the
laudation of others.
Veneada and Hallie Flower, he realized, were the
only intimates he had gathered in a solitary and
largely embittered existence. He had no instinctive
humanity of feeling, and his observations, colored
by his spleen, had not added to a small opinion of
man at large. Always feeling himself to be a figure
of supreme importance, he had never ceased to chafe
at the small aspect he was obliged to exhibit. This
mood had grown, through an uncomfortable sense
of shame, to a perpetual disparagement of all other
triumph and success.
Finally the band ceased its efforts, the oil lights
burned dim, and a movement to the cabins pro
ceeded, leaving him on a deserted deck. At last,
utterly exhausted, he went below in search of a
berth. They hung four deep about the walls, partly
curtained, while the floor of the cabin was filled
with clothesracks, burdened with a miscellany of
outer garments. One place only was empty — under
[22]
TUBAL CAIN
the ceiling; and he made a difficult ascent to the nar
row space. Sleep was an impossibility — a storm of
hoarse breathing, muttering, and sleepy oaths dinned
on his ears. The cabin, closed against the outer
air, grew indescribably polluted. Any former tor
ment of mind and body was minor compared to the
dragging wakeful hours that followed; a dread of
actual insanity seized him.
Almost at the first trace of dawn the cabin was
awakened and filled with fragmentary dressing.
The deck and bar were occupied by men waiting for
the appearance of the feminine passengers from
their cabin forward, and breakfast. The day was
warm and fine. The packet crossed a turgid river,
at the mouths of other canal routes, and entered a
wide pastoral valley.
Alexander Hulings sat facing a smaller, various
river ; at his back was a barrier of mountains, glossy
with early laurel and rhododendron. His face was
yellow and sunken, and his lips dry. John Wood-
drop passed and repassed him, a girl, his daughter
Gisela, on his arm. She wore an India muslin
dress, wide with crinoline, embroidered in flowers of
blue and green worsted, and a flapping rice-straw
hat draped in blond lace. Her face was pointed
and alert.
Once Hulings caught her glance, and he saw that
her eyes seemed black and — and — impertinent.
An air of palpable satisfaction emanated from the
Ironmaster. His eyes were dark too; and, more
[23]
TUBAL CAIN
than impertinent, they held for Hulings an intoler
able patronage. John Wooddrop's foot trod the
deck with a solid authority that increased the sick
man's smoldering scorn. At dinner he had an
actual encounter with the other. The table was
filling rapidly; Alexander Hulings had taken a
place when Wooddrop entered with his group and
surveyed the seats that remained.
"I am going to ask you," he addressed Hulings
in a deep voice, "to move over yonder. That will
allow my family to surround me."
A sudden unreasonable determination not to
move seized Hulings. He said nothing; he didn't
turn his head nor disturb his position. John Wood-
drop repeated his request in still more vibrant tones.
Hulings did nothing. He was held in a silent
rigidity of position.
"You, sir," Wooddrop pronounced loudly, "are
deficient in the ordinary courtesies of travel! And
note this, Mrs. Wooddrop" — he turned to his wife —
"I shall never again, in spite of Gisela's importu
nities, move by public conveyance. The presence
of individuals like this "
Alexander Hulings rose and faced the older, in
finitely more important man. His sunken eyes
blazed with such a feverish passion that the other
raised an involuntary palm.
"Individuals," he added, "painfully afflicted."
Suddenly Hulings' weakness betrayed him; he
collapsed in his chair with a pounding heart and
[24]
TUBAL CAIN
blurred vision. The incident receded, became
merged in the resumption of the commonplace
clatter of dinner.
Once more on deck, Alexander Hulings was aware
that he had appeared both inconsequential and
ridiculous, two qualities supremely detestable to his
pride; and this added to his bitterness toward the
Ironmaster. He determined to extract satisfaction
for his humiliation. It was characteristic of Hu
lings that he saw himself essentially as John Wood-
drop's equal; worldly circumstance had no power
to impress him; he was superior to the slightest trace
of the complacent inferiority exhibited by last night's
casual informer.
The day waned monotonously; half dazed with
weariness he heard bursts of music; far, meaning
less voices; the blowing of the packet horn. He
didn't go down again into the cabin to sleep, but
stayed wrapped in his cloak in a chair. He
slept through the dawn and woke only at the
full activity of breakfast. Past noon the boat tied
up at Harmony. The Wooddrops departed with
all the circumstance of worldly importance and in
the stir of cracking whip and restive, spirited horses.
Alexander Hulings moved unobserved, with his
trunk, to the bank.
Tubal Cain, he discovered, was still fifteen miles
distant, and — he had not told James Claypole of
his intended arrival — no conveyance was near by.
A wagon drawn by six mules with gay bells and
[25]
TUBAL CAIN
colored streamers and heavily loaded with lime
stone finally appeared, going north, on which
Hulings secured passage.
The precarious road followed a wooded ridge,
with a vigorous stream on the right and a wall of
hills beyond. The valley was largely uninhabited.
Once they passed a solid, foursquare structure of
stone, built against a hill, with clustered wooden
sheds and a great wheel revolving under a smooth
arc of water. A delicate white vapor trailed from
the top of the masonry, accompanied by rapid,
clear flames.
"Blue Lump Furnace," the wagon driver briefly
volunteered. "Belongs to Wooddrop. But that
doesn't signify anything about here. Pretty near
everything's his."
Alexander Hulings looked back, with an involun
tary deep interest in the furnace. The word "iron"
again vibrated, almost clanged, through his mind.
It temporarily obliterated the fact that here was
another evidence of the magnitude, the possessions,
of John Wooddrop. He was consumed by a sudden
anxiety to see James Claypole's forge. Why hadn't
the fool persisted, succeeded?
"Tubal Cain's in there." The mules were
stopped. "What there is of it! Four bits will be
enough."
He was left beside his trunk on the roadside,
clouded by the dust of the wagon's departure. Be
hind him, in the direction indicated, the ground,
[26]
TUBAL CAIN
covered with underbrush, fell away to a glint of
water and some obscure structures. Dragging his
baggage he made his way down to a long wooden
shed, the length facing him open on two covered
hearths, some dilapidated troughs, a suspended
ponderous hammer resting on an anvil, and a mis
cellaneous heap of rusting iron implements — long-
jawed tongs, hooked rods, sledges, and broken cast
ings. The hearths were cold; there was not a stir
of life, of activity, anywhere.
Hulings left his trunk in a clearing and explored
farther. Beyond a black heap of charcoal, stand
ing among trees, were two or three small stone
dwellings. The first was apparently empty, with
some whitened sacks on a bare floor; but within a
second he saw through the open doorway the lank
figure of a man kneeling in prayer. His foot was
on the sill; but the bowed figure, turned away, re
mained motionless.
Alexander Hulings hesitated, waiting for the
prayer to reach a speedy termination. But the
other, with upraised, quivering hands, remained so
long on his knees that Hulings swung the door back
impatiently. Even then an appreciable time elapsed
before the man inside rose to his feet. He turned
and moved forward, with an abstracted gaze in
pale-blue eyes set in a face seamed and scored by
time and disease. His expression was benevolent;
his voice warm and cordial.
"I am Alexander Hulings," that individual
[27]
TUBAL CAIN
briefly stated; "and I suppose you're Claypole."
The latter's condition, he thought instantaneously,
was entirely described by his appearance. James
Claypole's person was as neglected as the forge.
His stained breeches were engulfed in scarred
leather boots, and a coarse black shirt was open on
a gaunt chest.
His welcome left nothing to be desired. The
dwelling into which he conducted Hulings consisted
of a single room, with a small shed kitchen at the
rear and two narrow chambers above. There was
a pleasant absence of apology for the meager ac
commodations. James Claypole was an entirely
unaffected and simple host.
The late April evening was warm; and after a
supper, prepared by Claypole, of thick bacon, pota
toes and saleratus biscuit, the two men sat against
the outer wall of the house. On the left Hulings
could see the end of the forge shed, with the inevi
table water wheel hung in a channel cut from the
clear stream. The stream wrinkled and whispered
along spongy banks, and a flicker hammered on
a resonant limb. Hulings stated negligently that
he had arrived on the same packet with John Wood-
drop, and Claypole retorted:
"A man lost in the world! I tried to wrestle
with his spirit, but it was harder than the walls of
Jericho."
His eyes glowed with fervor. Hulings regarded
him curiously. A religious fanatic! He asked:
[28]
TUBAL CAIN
"What's been the trouble with Tubal Cain?
Other forges appear to flourish about here. This
Wooddrop seems to have built a big thing with
iron."
"Mammon!" Claypole stated. "Slag; dross!
Not this, but the Eternal World." The other failed
to comprehend, and he said so irritably. "All that,"
Claypole specified, waving toward the forge, "takes
the thoughts from the Supreme Being. Eager for
the Word, and a poor speller-out of the Book, you
can't spend priceless hours shingling blooms. And
then the men left, one after another, because I
stopped pandering to their carnal appetites. No
one can indulge in rum here, in a place of mine
sealed to God."
"Do you mean that whisky was a part of their
pay and that you held it back?" Alexander Hulings
demanded curtly. He was without the faintest
sympathy for what he termed such arrant folly.
"Yes, just that; a brawling, f reward crew.
Wooddrop wanted to buy, but I wouldn't extend his
wicked dominion, satisfy fleshly lust."
"It's a good forge, then?"
"None better! I built her mostly myself, when
I was laying up the treasure that rusted; stone on
stone, log on log. Heavy, slow work. The sluice
is like a city wall; the anvil bedded on seven feet of
oak. It's right! But if I'd known then I should
have put up a temple to Jehovah."
Hidings could scarcely contain his impatience.
[29]
TUBAL CAIN
"Why," he ejaculated, "you might have made a
fine thing out of it! Opportunity, opportunity,
and you let it go by. For sheer "
He broke off at a steady gaze from Claypole's
calm blue eyes. It was evident that he would have
to restrain any injudicious characterizations of the
other's belief. He spoke suddenly:
"I came up here because I was sick and had to
get out of Eastlake. I left everything but what
little money I had. You see — I was a failure. I'd
like to stay with you a while ; when perhaps I might
get on my feet again. I feel easier than I have
for weeks." He realized, surprised, that this was
so. He had a conviction that he could sleep here,
by the stream, in the still, flowering woods. "I
haven't any interest in temples," he continued; "but
I guess — two men — we won't argue about that.
Some allowance on both sides. But I am interested
in iron; I'd like to know this forge of yours back
ward. I've discovered a sort of hankering after the
idea; just that — iron. It's a tremendous fact, and
you can keep it from rusting."
[30]
Ill
THE following morning Claypole showed
Alexander Hulings the mechanics of Tubal
Cain. A faint reminiscent pride shone
through the later unworldly preoccupation. He
lifted the sluice gate, and the water poured
through the masoned channel of the forebay and set
in motion the wheel, hung with its lower paddles
in the course. In the forge shed Claypole bound a
connection, and the short haft of the trip hammer,
caught in revolving cogs, raised a ponderous head
and dropped it, with a jarring clang, on the anvil.
The blast of the hearths was driven by water wind,
propelled by a piston in a wood cylinder, with an
air chamber for even pressure. It was all so ele
mental that the neglect of the last years had but
spread over the forge an appearance of ill repair.
Actually it was as sound as the clear oak largely
used in its construction.
James Claypole's interest soon faded ; he returned
to his chair by the door of the dwelling, where he
laboriously spelled out the periods of a battered copy
of Addison's "Evidences of the Christian Religion."
He broke the perusal with frequent ecstatic ejacula
tions; and when Hulings reluctantly returned from
his study of the forge the other was again on his
[31]
TUBAL CAIN
knees, lost in passionate prayer. Hulings grew
hungry — Claypole was utterly lost in visions —
cooked some bacon and found cold biscuit in the
shedlike kitchen.
The afternoon passed into a tenderly fragrant
twilight. The forge retreated, apparently through
the trees, into the evening. Alexander Hulings sat
regarding it with an increasing impatience; first, it
annoyed him to see such a potentiality of power
lying fallow, and then his annoyance ripened into
an impatience with Claypole that he could scarcely
contain. The impracticable ass! It was a crime
to keep the wheel stationary, the hearths cold.
He had a sudden burning desire to see Tubal
Cain stirring with life; to hear the beat of the ham
mer forging iron; to see the dark, still interior lurid
with fire. He thought again of John Wooddrop,
and his instinctive disparagement of the accomplish
ments of others mocked both them and himself. If
he, Alexander Hulings, had had Claypole's chance,
his beginning, he would be more powerful than
Wooddrop now.
The law was a trivial foolery compared to the
fashioning, out of the earth itself, of iron. Iron,
the indispensable ! Railroads, in spite of the popu
lar, vulgar disbelief, were a coming great factor;
a thousand new uses, refinements, improved pro
cesses of manufacture were bound to develop. His
thoughts took fire and swept over him in a con
flagration of enthusiasm. By heaven, if Claypole
[32]
TUBAL CAIN
had failed he would succeed. He, too, would be
an Ironmaster!
A brutal chill overtook him with the night; he
shook pitiably; dark fears crept like noxious beetles
among his thoughts. James Claypole sat, with his
hands on his gaunt knees, gazing, it might be, at
a miraculous golden city beyond the black curtain
of the world. Later Hulings lay on a couch of
boards, folded in coarse blankets and his cape,
fighting the familiar evil sinking of his oppressed
spirit. He was again cold and yet drenched with
sweat ... if he were defeated now, he thought, if
he collapsed, he was done, shattered! And in his
swirling mental anguish he clung to one stable, cool
fact; he saw, like Claypole, a vision; but not gold
— great shadowy masses of iron. Before dawn the
dread receded; he fell asleep.
He questioned his companion at breakfast about
the details of forging.
"The secret," the latter stated, "is— timber;
wood, charcoal. It's bound to turn up ; fuel famine
will come, unless it is provided against. That's
where John Wooddrop's light. He counts on
getting it as he goes. A furnace'll burn five or six
thousand cords of wood every little while, and that
means two hundred or more acres. Back of Har
mony, here, are miles of timber the old man won't
loose up right for. He calculates no one else can
profit with them and takes his own time."
"What does Wooddrop own in the valleys?"
[33]
TUBAL CAIN
"Well — there's Sally Furnace; the Poole Saw
mill tract; the Medlar Forge and Blue Lump; the
coal holes on Allen Mountain; Marta Furnace and
Reeba Furnace — they ain't right hereabouts; the
Lode Orebank ; the Blossom Furnace and Charming
Forges; Middle and Low Green Forges; the Aus-
pacher Farm "
"That will do," Hulings interrupted him moodily;
"I'm not an assessor."
Envy lashed his determination to surprising
heights. Claypole grew uncommunicative, except
for vague references to the Kingdom at hand and
the dross of carnal desire. Finally, without a pre
paratory word, he strode away and disappeared over
the rise toward the road. At supper he had not
returned ; there was no trace of him when, inundated
with sleep, Hulings shut the dwelling for the night.
All the following day Alexander Hulings expected
his host; he spent the hours avidly studying the
implements of forging ; but the other did not appear.
Neither did he the next day, nor the next.
Hulings, surprisingly happy, was entirely alone
but for the hidden passage of wagons on the road
and the multitudinous birds that inhabited the
stream's edge, in the peaceful, increasing warmth of
the days and nights. His condition slowly im
proved. He bought supplies at the packet station
on the canal and shortly became as proficient at the
stove as James Claypole. Through the day he sat
in the mild sunlight or speculated among the im-
[34]
TUBAL CAIN
plements of the forge. He visualized the process of
iron making; the rough pigs, there were sows, too,
he had gathered, lying outside the shed had come
from the furnace. These were put into the hearths
and melted, stirred perhaps; then — what were the
wooden troughs for? — hammered, wrought on the
anvil. Outside were other irregularly round pieces
of iron, palpably closer in texture than the pig.
The forging of them, he was certain, had been com
pleted. There were, also, heavy bars, three feet
in length, squared at each end.
Everything had been dropped apparently at the
moment of James Claypole's absorbing view of
another, transcending existence. Late in an after
noon — it was May — he heard footfalls descending
from the road ; with a sharp, unreasoning regret, he
thought the other had returned. But it was a short,
ungainly man with a purplish face and impressive
shoulders. "Where's Jim?" he asked with a
markedly German accent.
Alexander Hulings told him who he was and all
he knew about Claypole.
"I'm Conrad Wishon," the newcomer stated,
sinking heavily into a chair. "Did Jim speak of
me — his head forgeman? No! But I guess he
told you how he stopped the schnapps. Ha!
James got religion. And he went away two weeks
ago? Maybe he'll never be back. This" — he
waved toward the forge — "means nothing to him.
"I live twenty miles up the road, and I saw a
[35]
TUBAL CAIN
Glory-wagon coming on — an old Conestoga, with
the Bible painted on the canvas, a traveling Shouter
slapping the reins, and a congregation of his family
staring out the back. James would take up with
a thing like that in a shot. Yes, sir; maybe now
you will never see him again. And your mother's
cousin! There's no other kin I've heard of; and
I was with him longer than the rest."
Hulings listened with growing interest to the
equable flow of Conrad Wishon's statements and
mild surprise.
"Things have been bad with me," the smith con
tinued. "My wife, she died Thursday before
breakfast, and one thing and another. A son has
charge of a coaling gang on Allen Mountain, but
I'm too heavy for that; and I was going down to
Green Forge when I thought I'd stop and see Jim.
But, hell! — Jim's gone; like as not on the Glory-
wagon. I can get a place at any hearth," he de
clared pridefully. "I'm a good forger; none better
in Hamilton County. When it's shingling a loop
I can show 'em all!"
"Have some supper," Alexander Hulings offered.
They sat late into the mild night, with the moon
light patterned like a grey carpet at their feet, talk
ing about the smithing of iron. Conrad Wishon
revealed the practical grasp of a life capably spent
at a single task, and Hulings questioned him with
an increasing comprehension.
[36]
TUBAL CAIN
"If you had money," Wishon explained, "we
could do something right here. I'd like to work
old Tubal Cain. I understand her."
The other asked: "How much would it take?"
Conrad Wishon spread out his hands hopelessly.
"A lot; and then a creekful back of that! Soon
as Wooddrop heard the hammer trip, he'd be around
to close you down. Do it in a hundred ways — no
teaming principally."
Rulings' antagonism to John Wooddrop increased
perceptibly; he became obsessed by the fantastic
thought of founding himself — Tubal Cain — tri
umphantly in the face of the established opposition.
But he had nothing — no money, knowledge, or even
a robust person. Yet his will to succeed in the
valleys hardened into a concrete aim. . . . Conrad
Wishon would be invaluable.
The latter stayed through the night and even
lingered, after breakfast, into the morning. He
was reluctant to leave the familiar scene of long
toil. They were sitting lost in discussion when the
beat of horses' hoofs was arrested on the road, and
a snapping of underbrush announced the appear
ance of a young man with a keen, authoritative
countenance.
"Mr. James Claypole?" he asked, addressing
them collectively.
Alexander Hulings explained what he could of
Claypole's absence.
[37]
TUBAL CAIN
"It probably doesn't matter," the other returned.
"I was told the forge wasn't run, for some foolish
ness or other." He turned to go.
"What did you want with him — with Tubal
Cain?" Conrad Wishon asked.
"Twenty-five tons of blooms."
"Now if this was ten years back "
The young man interrupted the smith, with a
gesture of impatience, and turned to go. Hulings
asked Conrad Wishon swiftly:
"Could it be done here? Could the men be got?
And what would it cost?"
"It could," said Wishon; "they might, and a
thousand dollars would perhaps see it through."
Hulings sharply called the retreating figure back.
"Something more about this twenty-five tons," he
demanded.
"For the Penn Rolling Mills," the other crisply
replied. "We're asking for delivery in five weeks,
but that might be extended a little — at, of course,
a loss on the ton. The quality must be first
grade."
Wishon grunted.
"Young man," he said, "blooms I made would
hardly need blistering to be called steel."
"I'm Philip Grere," the newcomer stated, "of
Grere Brothers, and they're the Penn Rolling Mills.
We want good blooms soon as possible and it seems
there's almost none loose. If you can talk iron,
[38]
TUBAL CAIN
immediate iron, let's get it on paper; if not, I have
a long way to drive."
When he had gone Conrad Wishon sat staring,
with mingled astonishment and admiration, at
Hulings.
"But," he protested, "y°u don't know nothing
about it!"
"You do!" Alexander Hulings told him; he saw
himself as a mind, of which Wishon formed the
trained and powerful body.
"Perhaps Jim will come back," the elder man
continued.
"That is a possibility," Alexander admitted.
"But I am going to put every dollar I own into the
chance of finishing those twenty-five tons."
The smith persisted: "But you don't know me;
perhaps I'm a rascal and can't tell a puddling
furnace from a chafery."
Hulings regarded him shrewdly.
"Conrad," he demanded, "can Tubal Cain do
it?"
"By Gott," Wishon exclaimed, "she can!"
After an hour of close •calculation Conrad
Wishon rose with surprising agility.
"I've got enough to do besides sitting here. Tu
bal Cain ought to have twenty men, anyhow; per
haps I can get eight. There's Mathias Slough, a
good hammerman. He broke an elbow at Charm
ing, and Wooddrop won't have him back; but he
[39]
TUBAL CAIN
can work still. Hance, a good nigger, is at my
place, and there is another — Surrie. Haines Zer-
bey, too, worked at refining, but you'll need to
watch his rum. Perhaps Old Man Boeshore will
lend a hand, and he's got a strapping grandson —
Emanuel. Jeremiah Stell doesn't know much, but
he'd let you cut a finger off for a dollar." He
shook his head gravely. "That is a middling poor
collection."
Alexander Hulings felt capable of operating Tu-
bal Cain successfully with a shift of blind para
lytics. A conviction of power, of vast capability,
possessed him. Suddenly he seemed to have be
come a part of the world that moved, of its crea
tive energy; he was like a piece of machinery newly
connected with the forceful driving 'whole. Con
rad Wishon had promised to return the next day
with the men he had enumerated, and Alexander
opened the small scattered buildings about the
forge. There were, he found, sufficient living pro
visions for eight or ten men out of a moldering
quantity of primitive bed furnishings, rusted tin,
and cracked glass. But it was fortunate that the
days were steadily growing warmer.
Wishon had directed him to clean out the chan
nel of the forebay, and throughout the latter half
of the day he was tearing heavy weeds from the in
terstices of the stones, laboring in a chill slime
that soon completely covered him. He removed
heavy rocks, matted dead bushes, banked mud; and
[40]
TUBAL CAIN
after an hour he was cruelly, impossibly weary.
He slipped and bruised a shoulder, cut open his
cheek; but he impatiently spat out the blood trail
ing into his mouth, and continued working. His
weariness became a hell of acute pain; without
manual practice his movements were clumsy; he
wasted what strength he had. Yet as his suffer
ing increased he grew only more relentlessly me
thodical in the execution of his task. He picked
out insignificant obstructions, scraped away grass
that offered no resistance to the water power.
When he had finished, the forebay, striking in at
an angle from the stream to the wheel, was meticu
lously clean.
He stumbled into his dwelling and fell on the
bed, almost instantly asleep, without removing a
garment, caked with filth; and never stirred until
the sun again flooded the room. He cooked and
ravenously ate a tremendous breakfast, and then
forced himself to walk the dusty miles that lay
between Tubal Cain and the canal. His legs
seemed to be totally without joints, and his spine
felt like a white-hot bar. At the store about which
the insignificant village of Harmony clustered he or
dered and paid for a great box of supplies, later
carried by an obliging teamster and himself to the
forge.
Once more there, he addressed himself to digging
out the slag that had hardened in the hearths.
The lightest bar soon became insuperably ponder-
[41]
TUBAL CAIN
ous; it wabbled in his grasp, evaded his purpose.
Vicious tears streamed over his blackened counte
nance, and he maintained a constant audible flow
of bitter invective. But even that arduous task
was nearly accomplished when dark overtook him.
He stripped off his garments, dropping them
where he stood, by the forge shed, and literally
fell forward into the stream. The cold shock
largely revived him, and he supped on huge tins
of coffee and hard flitch. Immediately after, he
dropped asleep as if he had been knocked uncon
scious by a club.
At mid-morning he heard a rattle of conveyance
from the road and his name called. Above he
found a wagon, without a top, filled with the sor
riest collection of humanity he had ever viewed,
and drawn by a dejected bony horse and a small
wicked mule.
"Here they are," Conrad Wishon announced;
"and Hance brought along his girl to cook."
Mathias Slough, the hammerman, was thin and
grey, as if his face were covered with cobwebs;
Hance, Conrad's nigger, black as an iron bloom,
was carrying upside down a squawking hen; Sur-
rie, lighter, had a dropped jaw and hands that
hung below his knees; Haines Zerbey had pale,
swimming eyes, and executed a salute with a bat
tered flat beaver hat; Old Man Boeshore resembled
a basin, bowed in at the stomach, his mouth sunken
on toothless gums, but there was agility in his step ;
[42]
TUBAL CAIN
and Emanuel, his grandson, a towering hulk of
youth, presented a facial expanse of mingled pim
ples and down. Jeremiah Stell was a small,
shriveled man, with dead-white hair on a smooth,
pinkish countenance.
Standing aside from the nondescript assemblage
of men and transient garments, Alexander Hulings
surveyed them with cold determination; two emo
tions possessed him — one of an almost humorous
dismay at the slack figures on whom so much de
pended; and a second, stronger conviction that he
could force his purpose even from them. They
were, in a manner, his first command; his first ma
terial from which to build the consequence, the suc
cess, that he felt was his true expression.
He addressed a few brief periods to them; and
there was no warmth, no effort to conciliate, in
his tones, his dry statement of a heavy task for a
merely adequate gain. He adopted this attitude
instinctively, without forethought; he was dimly
conscious, as a principle, that underpaid men were
more easily driven than those over-fully rewarded.
And he intended to drive the men before him to the
limit of their capability. They had no individual
existence for Alexander Hulings, no humanity;
they were merely the implements of a projection of
his own; their names — Haines Zerbey, Slough —
had no more significance than the terms bellows or
tongs.
They scattered to the few habitations by the
[43]
TUBAL CAIN
stream, structures mostly of logs and plaster; and
in a little while there rose the odorous smoke and
sputtering fat of Hance's girl's cooking. Conrad
Wishon soon started the labor of preparing the
forge. Jeremiah Stell, who had some slight knowl
edge of carpentry, was directed to repair the
plunger of the water-wind apparatus. Slough was
testing the beat and control of the trip hammer.
Hance and Surrie carried outside the neglected
heaps of iron hooks and tongs. Conrad explained
to Alexander Hulings:
"I sent word to my son about the charcoal; he'll
leave it at my place, but we shall have to haul it
from there. Need another mule — maybe two.
There's enough pig here to start, and my idea is
to buy all we will need now at Blue Lump; they'll
lend us a sled, so's we will have it in case old
Wooddrop tries to clamp down on us. I'll go
along this afternoon and see the head furnace man.
It will take money."
Without hesitation, Hulings put a considerable
part of his entire small capital into the other's
hand. At suppertime Conrad Wishon returned
with the first load of metal for the Penn Rolling
Mills contract.
Later Hance produced a wheezing accordion and,
rocking on his feet, drew out long, wailing notes.
He sang:
"Brothers, let us leave
Bukra Land for Hayti;
[44]
TUBAL CAIN
There we be receive'
Grand as Lafayette"
"With changes of men," Conrad continued to
Alexander Hulings, "the forges could run night
and day, like customary. But with only one lot
we'll have to sleep. Someone will stay up to tend
the fires."
In the morning the labor of making the wrought
blooms actually commenced. Conrad Wishon and
Hance at one hearth, and Haines Zerbey with Sur-
rie at the other, stood ceaselessly stirring, with
long iron rods, the fluxing metal at the incandes
cent cores of the fires. Alexander then saw that
the troughs of water were to cool the rapidly heat
ing rods. Conrad Wishon was relentless in his in
sistence on long working of the iron. There were,
already, muttered protests. "The dam' stuff was
cooked an hour back!" But he drowned the ob
jections in a surprising torrent of German-Ameri
can cursing.
Hulings was outside the shed when he heard the
first dull fall of the hammer; and it seemed to him
that the sound had come from a sudden pounding
of his expanded heart. He, Alexander Hulings,
was making iron; his determination, his capability
and will were hammering out of the stubborn raw
material of earth a foothold for himself and a justi
fication! The smoke, pouring blackly, streaked
with crimson sparks, from the forge shed, sifted a
fine soot on the green-white flowers of a dogwood
[45]
TUBAL CAIN
tree. A metallic clamor rose; and Emanuel, the
youth, stripped to the waist and already smeared
with sweat and grime, came out for a gulping
breath of unsullied air.
The characteristics of the small force soon be
came evident. Conrad Wishon labored cease
lessly, with an unimpaired power at fifty apparent
even to Alexander's intense self-absorption. Of
the others, Hance, the negro, was easily the supe
rior ; his strength was Herculean, his willingness in
exhaustible. Surrie was sullen. Mathias Slough
constantly grumbled at the meager provisions for
his comfort and efforts; yet he was a skillful work
man. When Alexander had correctly gauged Zer-
bey's daily dram he, too, was useful; but the others
were negligible. They made the motions of labor,
but force was absent.
Alexander Hulings watched with narrowed eyes.
When he was present the work in the shed notably
improved; all the men except Conrad avoided his
implacable gaze. He rarely addressed a remark
to them; he seemed withdrawn from the operation
that held so much for him. Conrad Wishon easily
established his dexterity at "shingling a loop."
Working off a part of a melting sow, he secured
it with wide- jawed shingling tongs; and, steady
ing the pulsating mass on an iron plate, he sledged
it into a bloom. For ten hours daily the work con
tinued, the hearths burned, the trip hammer fell
and fell. The interior of the shed was a grimy
[46]
TUBAL CAIN
shadow lighted with lurid flares and rose and gen
tian flowers of iron. Ruddy reflections slid over
glistening shoulders and intent, bitter faces; harsh
directions, voices, sounded like the grating of cast
ings.
The oddly assorted team was dispatched for char
coal, and then sent with a load of blooms to the
canal. Hance had to be spared, with Surrie, for
that; the forge was short of labor, and Alexander
Hulings joined Conrad in the working of the metal.
It was, he found, exhausting toil. He was light
and unskilled, and the mass on the hearth slipped
continually from his stirring; or else it fastened,
with a seeming spite, on his rod, and he was power
less to move it. Often he swung from his feet,
straining in supreme, wrenching effort. His body
burned with fatigue, his eyes were scorched by the
heat of the fires; he lost count of days and nights.
They merged imperceptibly one into another; he
must have dreamed of his racking exertions, for
apparently they never ceased.
Alexander became indistinguishable from the
others; all cleanness was forgotten; he ate in a
stupefaction of weariness, securing with his fingers
whatever was put before him. He was engaged
in a struggle the end of which was hidden in the
black smoke perpetually hanging over him; in the
torment of the present, an inhuman suffering to
which he was bound by a tryannical power outside
his control, he lost all consciousness of the future.
[47]
TUBAL CAIN
The hammerman's injured arm prevented his
working for two days, and Alexander Hulings
cursed him in a stammering rage, before which the
other was shocked and dumb. He drove Old Man
Boeshore and his grandson with consideration for
neither age nor youth; the elder complained end
lessly, tears even slid over his corrugated face; the
youth was brutally burned, but Hulings never re
laxed his demands.
It was as if they had all been caught in a whirl
pool, in which they fought vainly for release — the
whirlpool of Alexander Hulings' domination.
They whispered together, he heard fragments of
intended revolt; but under his cold gaze, his thin,
tight lips, they subsided uneasily. It was patent
that they were abjectly afraid of him. . . . The
blooms moved in a small but unbroken stream
over the road to the canal.
He had neglected to secure other horses or
mules; and, while waiting for a load of iron on
the rough track broken from the road to the forge,
the horse slid to his knees, fell over, dead — the
last ounce of effort wrung from his angular frame.
The mule, with his ears perpetually laid back and
a raised lip, seemed impervious to fatigue; <his
spirit, his wickedness, persisted in the face of ap
palling toil. The animal's name, Hulings knew,
was Alexander; he overheard Hance explaining
this to Old Man Boeshore:
"That mule's bound to be Alexander; ain't no-
[48]
TUBAL CAIN
body but an Alexander work like that mule! He's
bad too; he'd lay you cold and go right on about
his business."
Old Man Boeshore muttered something exces
sively bitter about the name Alexander.
"If you sh'd ask me," he stated, "I'd tell you
that he ain't human. He's got a red light in his
eye, like "
Hulings gathered that this was not still directed
at the mule.
More than half of the order for the Penn Rolling
Mills had been executed and lay piled by the canal.
He calculated the probable time still required, the
amount he would unavoidably lose through the de
lay of faulty equipment and insufficient labor.
If James Claypole came back now, he thought, and
attempted interference, he would commit murder.
It was evening, and he was seated listlessly, with
his chair tipped back against the dwelling he
shared with Conrad Wishon. The latter, close by,
was bowed forward, his head, with a silvery gleam
of faded hair, sunk on his breast. A catbird was
whistling an elaborate and poignant song, and the
invisible stream passed with a faint, choked whis
per.
"We're going to have trouble with that girl of
Hance's," Wishon pronounced suddenly; "she has
taken to meeting Surrie in the woods. If Hance
comes on them there will be wet knives ! "
Such mishaps, Alexander Hulings knew, were
[49]
TUBAL CAIN
an acute menace to his success. The crippling or
loss of Hance might easily prove fatal to his hopes ;
the negro, immensely powerful, equable, and will
ing, was of paramount importance.
"I'll stop that!" he declared. But the trouble
developed before he had time to intervene.
He came on the two negroes the following morn
ing, facing each other, with, as Conrad had pre
dicted, drawn knives. Hance stood still; but Sur-
rie, with bent knees and the point of his steel al
most brushing the grass, moved about the larger
man. Hulings at once threw himself between
them.
"What damned nonsense's this?" he demanded.
"Get back to the team, Hance, and you, Surrie,
drop your knife!"
The former was on the point of obeying, when
Surrie ran in with a sweeping hand. Alexander
Hulings jumped forward in a cold fury and felt a
sudden numbing slice across his cheek. He had a
dim consciousness of blood smearing his shoulder;
but all his energy was directed on the stooped figure
falling away from his glittering rage.
"Get out!" he directed in a thin, evil voice.
"If you are round here in ten minutes I'll blow a
hole through your skull!"
Surrie was immediately absorbed by the under
brush.
Hulings had a long diagonal cut from his brow
across and under his ear. It bled profusely, and
[50]
TUBAL CAIN
as his temper receded fainitness dimmed his vision.
Conrad Wishon blotted the wound with cobwebs;
a cloth, soon stained, was bound about Alexander's
head, and after dinner he was again in the forge,
whipping the flagging efforts of his men with a
voice like a thin leather thong. If the labor were
delayed, he recognized, the contract would not be
filled. The workmen were wearing out, like the
horse. He moved young Emanuel to the hauling
with Hance, the wagon now drawn by three mules.
The hammerman's injured arm had grown in
flamed, and he was practically one-handed in his
management of the trip hammer.
While carrying a lump of iron to the anvil the
staggering, ill-assorted group with the tongs
dropped their burden, and stood gazing stupidly
at the fallen, glowing mass. They were hardly re
vived by Hulings' lashing scorn= He had increased
Haines Zerbey's daily dram, but the drunkard was
now practically useless. Jeremiah Stell contracted
an intermittent fever; and, though he still toiled in
the pursuit of his coveted wage, he was of doubtful
value.
Alexander Hulings' body had become as hard
as Conrad's knotted forearm. He ate huge
amounts of half-cooked pork, washed hastily down
by tin cups of black coffee, and fell into instant
slumber when the slightest opportunity offered.
His face was matted by an unkempt beard; his
hands, the pale hands of an Eastlake lawyer, were
[51]
TUBAL CAIN
black, like Hance's, with palms of leather. He
surveyed himself with curi'ous amusement in a bro
ken fragment of looking-glass nailed to the wall;
the old Hulings, pursued by inchoate dread, had
vanished. ... In his place was Alexander Hu
lings, a practical iron man! He repeated the des
criptive phrase aloud, with an accent of arogant
pride. Later, with an envelope from the Penn
Rolling Mills, he said it again, with even more con
fidence; he held the pay for the blooms which he
had~it seemed in another existence — promised to
deliver.
He stood leaning on a tree before the forge;
within, Conrad Wishon and Hance were piling the
metal hooks with sharp, ringing echoes. All the
others had vanished magically, at once, as if from
an exhausted spell. Old Man Boeshore had de
parted with a piping implication, supported by
Emanuel, his grandson.
Alexander Hulings was reviewing his material
situation. It was three hundred and thirty dollars
better than it had been on his arrival at Tubal
Cain. In addition to that he had a new store of
confidence, of indomitable pride, vanity, a more
actual support. He gazed with interest toward the
near future, and with no little doubt. It was
patent that he could not proceed as he had begun;
such combinations could not be forced a second
time. He intended to remain at James Claypole's
[52]
TUBAL CAIN
forge, conducting it as though it were his own —
for the present, anyhow — but he should have to get
an efficient working body ; and many additions were
necessary — among them a blacksmith shop. He
had, with Conrad Wishon, the conviction that Clay-
pole would not return.
More capital would be necessary. He was re
volving this undeniable fact when, through the lush
June foliage, he saw an open carriage turn from
the road and descend to the forge clearing. It held
an erect, trimly whiskered form and a negro driver.
The former was John Wooddrop. He gazed with
surprise, that increased to a recognition, a memory,
of Alexander Hulings.
"Jim Claypole?" he queried.
"Not here," Hulings replied, even more laconi
cally.
"Nonsense! I'm told he's been running Tubal
Cain again. Say to him — and I've no time to
dawdle — that John Wooddrop's here."
"Well, Claypole's not," the other repeated.
"He's away. I'm running this forge — Alexander
Hulings."
Wooddrop's mouth drew into a straight hard line
from precise whisker to whisker. "I have been
absent," he said finally. It was palpably an ex
planation, almost an excuse. Conrad Wishon
appeared from within the forge shed. "Ah,
Conrad!" John Wooddrop ejaculated pleasantly.
[53]
TUBAL CAIN
"Glad to find you at the hearth again. Come and
see me in the morning."
"I think I'll stay here," the forgeman replied,
"now Tubal Cain's working."
"Then, in a week or so," the Ironmaster answered
imperturbably.
All Alexander Hillings' immaterial dislike of
Wooddrop solidified into a concrete, vindictive
enmity. He saw the beginning of a long, bitter,
stirring struggle.
[54]
m]
IV
"FTTIHAT'S about it!" Conrad Wishon af
firmed. They were seated by the door
way of the dwelling at Tubal Cain.
It was night, and hot; and the heavy air was
constantly fretted by distant, vague thunder. Alex
ander Hulings listened with pinched lips.
"I saw Derek, the founder at Blue Lump, and
ordered the metal; then he told me that Wooddrop
had sent word not to sell a pig outside his own
forges. That comes near closing us up. I mis
doubt that we could get men, anyhow — not without
we went to Pittsburgh; and that would need big
orders, big money. The old man's got us kind of
shut in here, with only three mules and one wagon
— we couldn't make out to haul any distance; and
John Wooddrop picks up all the loose teams. It
looks bad, that's what it does. No credit, too; I
stopped at Harmony for some forge hooks, and
they wouldn't let me take them away until you had
paid. A word's been dropped there likewise."
Hulings could see, without obvious statement,
that his position was difficult; it was impossible
seemingly, with his limited funds and equipment,
to go forward and — no backward course existed:
nothing but a void, ruin, the way across which had
[55]
TUBAL CAIN
been destroyed. He turned with an involuntary
dread from the fleeting contemplation of the past,
mingled with monotony and suffering, and set all
his cold, passionate mind on the problem of his
future. He would, he told himself, succeed with
iron here. He would succeed in spite of John
Wooddrop — no, because of the Ironmaster; the
latter increasingly served as an actual object of
comparison, an incentive, and a deeply involved
spectator.
He lost himself in a gratifying vision, when
Conrad's voice, shattering the facile heights he had
mounted, again fastened his attention on the ex
igencies of the present.
"A lot of money!" the other repeated. "I guess
we'll have to shut down; but I'd almost rather
drive mules on the canal that go to John Wood-
drop."
Hulings declared: "You'll do neither, and Tubal
Cain won't shut down!" He rose, turned into the
house.
"What's up?" Wishon demanded at the sudden
movement.
"I'm going after money," Hulings responded
from within — "enough. A packet is due east
before dawn."
If the canal boat had seemed to go slowly on his
way to Harmony, it appeared scarcely to stir on
his return. There was no immediate train con
nection at Columbus, and he footed the uneven
[56]
TUBAL CAIN
shaded walks in an endless pattern, unconscious of
houses, trees, or passing people, lost in the re
hearsal of what he had to say, until the horn of an
immediate departure summoned him to a seat in a
coach.
The candles at each end sent a shifting, pale
illumination over the cramped interior, voluminous
skirts and prodigiously whiskered countenances.
Each delay increased his impatience to a muttering
fury; it irked him that he was unable to declare
himself, Alexander Hulings, to the train captain,
and by the sheer bulk of that name force a more
rapid progress.
Finally in Eastlake, Veneada gazed at him out
of a silent astonishment.
"You say you're Alex Hulings!" the doctor
exclaimed. "Some of you seems to be; but the
rest is — by heaven, iron! I'll admit now I was
low about you when you left, in April; I knew
you had gimp, and counted on it; however "
The period expired in a wondering exhalation.
Veneada pounded on his friend's chest, dug into
his arm. "A horse!" he declared.
Alexander Hulings impatiently withdrew from
the other's touch.
"Veneada," he said, "once you asked me to come
to you if I wanted money, if I happened on a good
thing. I said nothing at the time, because I
couldn't picture an occasion when I'd do such a
thing. Well — it's come. I need money, and I'm
[57]
TUBAL CAIN
asking you for it. And, I warn you, it will be a
big sum. If you can't manage it, I must go some
where else; I'd go to China, if necessary — I'd stop
people, strangers, on the street.
"A big sum," Hulings reiterated somberly; "per
haps ten, perhaps twenty, thousand. Not a loan,"
he added immediately, "but an investment — an in
vestment in me. You must come out to Harmony.
I can't explain: it wouldn't sound convincing in
Eastlake. In the valleys, at Tubal Cain, the thing
will be self-evident. I have made a beginning
with practically nothing; and I can go on. But
it will require capital, miles of forest, furnaces
built, Pittsburgh swept bare of good men. No,"
he held up a hardened, arresting palm, "don't at
tempt to discuss it now. Come out to Tubal Cain
and see; learn about John Wooddrop and how to
turn iron into specie."
At the end of the week there were three chairs
canted against the stone wall of the little house by
the stream that drove Tubal Cain Forge. Conrad
Wishon, with a scarlet undershirt open on a broad,
hairy chest, listened with wonderment to the sharp
periods of Alexander Hulings and Veneada; in
credulously he heard mammoth sums of money
estimated, projected, dismissed as commonplace.
Veneada said:
"I've always believed in your ability, Alex; all
that I questioned was the opportunity. Now that
has gone; the chance is here. You've got those
[58]
TUBAL CAIN
steel-wire fingers of yours about something rich,
and you will never let go. It sounds absurd to go
up against this Wooddrop, a despot and a firmly
established power; anyone might well laugh at
me, but I feel a little sorry for the older man. He
doesn't know you.
"You haven't got insides, sympathies, weak
nesses, like the others of us; the thing is missing
in you that ordinarily betrays human men into
slips; yes — compassion. You are not pretty to
think about, Alex ; but I suppose power never really
is. You know I've got money and you know, too,
that you can have it. As safe with you as in a
bank vault!"
"We'll go back to Eastlake tomorrow," Hulings
decided, "lay out our plans, and draw up papers.
We'll buy the loose timber quietly through agents;
I'll never appear in any of it. After that we can
let out the contracts for two furnaces. I don't
know anything about them now; but I shall in a
week. Wishon had better live on here, pottering
about the forge, until he can be sent to Pittsburgh
after workmen. His pay will start tomorrow."
"What about Tubal Cain, and that fellow—
what's his name?"
"Claypole, James. I'll keep a record of what
his forge makes, along with mine, and bank it.
Common safety. Then I must get over to New
York, see the market there, men. I have had let
ters from an anchor foundry in Philadelphia.
[59]
TUBAL CAIN
There are nail factories, locomotive shops, stove
plate, to furnish. A hundred industries. I'll have
them here in time — rolling mills you will hear back
in the mountains. People on the packets will see
the smoke of my furnaces — Alexander Hulings'
iron!"
"You might furnish me with a pass, so that I
could occasionally walk through and admire,"
Veneada said dryly.
Hulings never heard him.
"I'll have a mansion," he added abstractedly,
"better than Wooddrop's, with more rooms "
"All full, I suppose, of little glorious Hu-
lingses!" the doctor interrupted.
Alexander regarded him unmoved. His thoughts
suddenly returned to Hallie Flower. He saw her
pale, strained face, her clasped hands; he heard
the thin echo of her mingled patience and dismay:
"Then I'll never be married!" There was no
answering stir of regret, remorse; she slipped for
ever out of his consciousness, as if she had been a
shadow vanishing before a flood of hard, white
light.
[60]
GREATLY to Alexander Rulings' relief,
Doctor Veneada never considered the pos
sibility of a partnership; it was as far
from one man's wish, for totally different reasons,
as from the other's.
"No, no, Alex," he declared; " I couldn't manage
it. Some day, when you were out of the office, the
widow or orphan would come in with the fore
closure, and I would tear up the papers. Seriously,
I won't do — I'm fat and easy and lazy. My money
would be safer with me carefully removed from
the scene."
In the end Alexander protected Veneada with
mortgages on the timber and land he secured about
Harmony through various agents and under dif
ferent names. Some of the properties he bought
outright, but in the majority he merely purchased
options on the timber. His holdings in the latter
finally extended in a broad, irregular belt about
the extended local industries of John Wooddrop.
It would be impossible for the latter, when, in per
haps fifteen years, he had exhausted his present
forests, to cut an acre of wood within practicable
hauling distance. This accomplished, a momen-
[61]
TUBAL CAIN
tary grim satisfaction was visible on Hillings'
somber countenance.
He had, however, spent all the money furnished
by Doctor Veneada, without setting the foundations
of the furnaces and forges he had projected, and
he decided not to go to his friend for more. There
were two other possible sources of supply: allied
iron industries — the obvious recourse — and the
railroads. The latter seemed precarious; every
where people, and even print, were ridiculing the
final usefulness of steam traffic; it was judged un
fit for heavy and continuous hauling — a toy of
inventors and fantastic dreaming; canals were, the
obviously solid means of transportation. But
Alexander Hulings became fanatical overnight in
his belief in the coming empire of steam.
With a small carpetbag, holding his various
deeds and options, and mentally formulating a
vigorous expression of his opinions and projections,
he sought the doubting capital behind the Colum
bus Transportation Line. When, a month later,
he returned to Tubal Cain, it was in the company
of an expert industrial engineer, and with credit
sufficient for the completion of his present plans.
He had been gone a month, but he appeared older
by several years. Alexander Hulings had forced
from reluctant sources, from men more wily, if less
adamantine, than himself, what he desired; but in
return he had been obliged to grant almost impos
sibly favorable contracts and preferences. A tre-
[62]
TUBAL CAIN
mendous pressure of responsiblity had gathered
about him; but under it he was still erect, coldly
confident, and carried himself with the special
pugnacity of small, vain men.
On a day in early June, a year from the delivery
of his first contract at Tubal Cain, he stood in a
fine rain at the side of a light road wagon, drawn,
like John Wooddrop's, by two sweeping young
horses, held by a negro, and watched the final courses
of his new furnace. The furnace itself, a solid
structure of unmasoned stone, rose above thirty feet,
narrowed at the top almost to half the width of its
base. Directly against its face and hearth was
built the single high interior of the cast house, into
which the metal would be run on a sand pig bed
to harden into commercial iron.
On the hill rising abruptly at the back was the
long wall of the coal house, with an entrance and
runway leading to the opening at the top of the fur
nace stack. Lower down, the curving artificial
channel of the forebay swept to where the water
would fall on a ponderous overshot wheel and
drive the great tilted bellows that blasted the fur
nace.
The latter, Alexander knew, must have a name.
Most furnaces were called after favorite women;
but there were no such sentimental objects in his
existence. He recalled the name of the canal
packet that had first drawn him out to Harmony —
the Hit or Miss. JNo casual title such as that
[63]
TUBAL CAIN
would fit an enterprise of his. He thought of Tubal
Cain, and then of Jim Claypole. He owed the
latter something; and yet he wouldn't have another
man's name. . . . Conrad Wishon had surmised
that the owner of Tubal Cain had vanished — like
Elijah — on a Glory-wagon. That was it — Glory
Furnace! He turned and saw John Wooddrop
leaning forward out of his equipage, keenly study
ing the new buildings.
"That's a good job," the Ironmaster allowed;
"but it should be, built by Henry Bayard, the first
man in the country. It ought to do very well for
five or six years."
"Fifty," Hulings corrected him.
John Wooddrop's eyes were smiling.
"It's all a question of charcoal," he explained,
as Wishon had, long before. "To be frank, I ex
pect a little difficulty myself, later. It is surpris
ing how generally properties have been newly
bought in the county. I know, because lately I,
too, have been reaching out. Practically all the
available stuff has been secured. Thousands of
acres above you, here, have been taken by a com
pany, hotel — or something of the sort."
"The Venealic Company," Hulings said; and
then, in swelling pride, he added: "That's me!"
Wooddrop's gaze hardened. Alexander Hulings
thought the other's face grew paler. His impor
tance, his sense of accomplishment, of vindication,
[64]
TUBAL CAIN
completely overwhelmed him. "And beyond, it is
me!" he cried. "And back of that, again!" He
made a wide, sweeping gesture with his arm.
"Over there; the Hezekiah Mills tract — that's me
too; and the East purchase, and on and round.
Fifty! This Glory Furnace, and ten others, could
run on for a century.
"You've been the big thing here — even in the
state. You are known on canal boats, people
point you out; yes, and patronize me. You did
that yourself — you and your women. But it is
over; I'm coming now, and John Wooddrop's
going. You are going with those same canal boats,
and Alexander Hulings is rising with the rail
roads."
He pounded himself on the chest, and then
suddenly stopped. It was the only impassioned
speech, even in the disastrous pursuit of the law,
that he had ever made; and it had an impotent,
foolish ring in his ear, his deliberate brain. He
instantly disowned all that part of him which had
betrayed his ordinary silent caution into such windy
boasting. Hulings was momentarily abashed be
fore the steady scrutiny of John Wooddrop.
"When I first saw you," the latter pronounced,
"I concluded that you were unbalanced. Now I
think that you are a maniac!"
He spoke curtly to his driver, and was sharply
whirled away through the grey-green veil of rain
[65]
TUBAL CAIN
and foliage. Hulings was left with an aggravated
discontent and bitterness toward the older man,
who seemed to have the ability always to place him
in an unfavorable light.
[66]
DOCTOR VENEADA returned for the first
run of metal from Glory Furnace; there
were two representatives of the other capi
tal invested, and, with Alexander Hulings, Conrad
Wishon, and some local spectators, they stood in
the gloom of the cast house waiting for the founder
to tap the clay sealing of the hearth. Suddenly
there was a rush of crackling white light, pouring
sparks, and the boiling liquid flooded out, rapidly
filling the molds radiating from the channels
stamped in the sand bed. The incandescent iron
flushed from silver to darker, warmer tones.
A corresponding warmth ran through Alexander
Hulings' body; Glory Furnace was his; it had been
conceived by him and his determination had
brought it to an actuality. He would show Wood-
drop a new type of "maniac." This was the second
successful step in his move against the Ironmaster,
in the latter's own field. Then he realized that he,
too, might now be called Ironmaster. He directed
extensive works operated under his name; he, Hu
lings, was the head ! Already there were more than
a hundred men to do what he directed, go where he
wished. The feeling of power, of consequence,
quickened through him. Alexander held himself,
[67]
TUBAL CAIN
|if possible, more rigidly than before; he followed
every minute turn of the casting, tersely admonish
ing a laborer.
He was dressed with the utmost care; a marked
niceness of apparel now distinguished him. His
whiskers were closely trimmed, his hair brushed
high under a glossy tile hat; he wore checked
trousers, strapped on glazed Wellington boots, a
broadcloth coat, fitted closely to his waist, with a
deep rolling collar; severe neckcloth, and a num
ber of seals on a stiff twill waistcoat. Veneada, as
always, was carelessly garbed in wrinkled silk and
a broad planter's hat. It seemed to Alexander
that the other looked conspicuously older than he
had only a few months back; the doctor's face was
pendulous, the pouches beneath his eyes livid.
Alexander Hulings quickly forgot this in the
immediate pressure of manufacture. The younger
Wishon, who had followed his father into Alexan
der's service, now came down from the charcoal
stacks in a great sectional wagon drawn by six
mules, collared in bells and red streamers. The
pigs were sledged in endless procession from Glory,
and then from a second furnace, to the forges that
reached along the creek in each direction from
Tubal Cain. The latter was worked as vigorously
as possible, but Alexander conducted its finances in
a separate, private column; all the profit he banked
to the credit of James Claypole. He did this not
from a sense of equity, but because of a deeper,
[68]
TUBAL CAIN
more obscure feeling, almost a superstition, that
such ackowledgment of the absent man's unwitting
assistance was a safeguard of further good for
tune.
The months fled with amazing rapidity; it
seemed to him that one day the ground was shrouded
in snow, and on the next the dogwood was bloom
ing. No man in all his properties worked harder
or through longer hours than Alexander; the night
shift at a forge would often see him standing grimly
in the lurid reflections of the hearths; charcoal
burners, eating their flitch and potatoes on an out
lying mountain, not infrequently heard the beat of
his horse's hoofs on the soft moss, his domineering
voice bullying them for some slight oversight. He
inspired everywhere a dread mingled with grudging
admiration ; it was known that he forced every pos
sible ounce of effort from workman and beast.
Nevertheless, toward the end of the third summer
of his success he contracted a lingering fever, and
he was positively commanded to leave his labors
for a rest and change. Wrapped in a shawl, he sat
on the porch of the house he had commenced build
ing, on a rise overlooking the eddying smoke of his
industries, and considered the various places that
offered relaxation; he could go to the sea, at Long
Branch, or to Saratoga, the gayety and prodigality
of which were famous. . . . But his thought re
turned to his collapse four years before; he heard
Veneada counseling him to take the water of
[69]
TUBAL CAIN
the Mineral Springs. He had been too poor
then for the Mineral; had he gone there, he would
have arrived unnoticed. By heaven, he would go
there now! It was, he knew, less fashionable than
the other places; its day had been twenty, thirty
years before. But it represented once more his
progress, his success; and, in the company of his
personal servant, his leather boxes strapped at the
back of his lightest road wagon, he set out the
following morning.
Almost sixty miles of indifferent roads lay before
him; and, though he covered, in his weakened con
dition, far more than half the distance by evening,
he was forced to stay overnight at a roadside
tavern. The way was wild and led through nar
row, dark valleys, under the shadow of uninhabited
ridges, and through swift fords. Occasionally he
passed great, slow Conestoga wagons, entrained
for the West; leather-hooded, ancient vehicles; and
men on horses.
The wagon broke suddenly into the smooth,
green valley that held the Mineral Springs. Against
a western mountain were grouped hotels; a bridge,
crossing a limpid stream; pointed kiosks in the
Chinese taste; and red gravel walks. The hotel
before which Alexander stopped — a prodigiously
long, high structure painted white — had a deep
porch across its face with slender columns towering
up unbroken to the roof and festooned with trum
pet flowers. A bell rang loudly for dinner; and
[70]
TUBAL CAIN
there was a colorful flow of crinoline over the porch,
a perfumed flowery stir, through which he impa
tiently made his way, followed by negro boys with
his luggage.
Within, the office was high and bare, with a
sweeping staircase, and wide doors opened on a
lofty thronged dining room. Above, he was led
through interminable narrow corridors, past mul
titudinous closed doors, to a closetlike room com
pletely filled by a narrow bed, a chair, and a corner
washstand; this, with some pegs in the calcined
wall and a bell rope, completed the provisions for
his comfort. His toilet was hurried, for he had
been warned that extreme promptness at meals was
more than desirable; and, again below, he was led
by a pompous negro between long, crowded tables
to a place at the farther end. The din of conversa
tion and clatter of dishes were deafening. In the
ceiling great connected fans were languidly pulled
by black boys, making a doubtful circulation.
His dinner was cold and absurdly inadequate,
but the table claret was palatable. And, after the
isolation of Tubal Cain, the droves of festive people
absorbed him. Later, at the bar, he came across an
acquaintance, a railroad director, who pointed out
to Alexander what notables were present. There
was an Englishman, a lord; there was Bartram
Ainscough, a famous gambler; there — Alexander's
arm was grasped by his companion.
"See that man — no, farther — dark, in a linen
[71]
TUBAL CAIN
suit? Well, that's Partridge Sinnox, of New Or
leans." He grew slightly impatient at Hillings'
look of inquiry. "Never heard of him! Best-
known pistol shot in the States. A man of the
highest honor. Will go out on the slightest provo
cation." His voice lowered. "He's said to have
killed twelve — no less. His companion there, from
Louisiana too, never leaves him. Prodigiously
rich: canefields."
Alexander Hulings looked with small interest at
the dueller and his associate. The former had a
lean, tanned face, siriall black eyes that held each
a single point of light, and long, precise hands.
Here, Alexander thought, was another form of pub
licity, different from his own. As always, his lips
tightened in a faint contempt at pretensions other
than his, or threatening to his preeminence. Sinnox
inspired none of the dread or curiosity evident in
his companion; and he turned from him to the in
spection of a Pennsylvania coal magnate.
The colonnade of the hotel faced another culti
vated ridge, on which terraced walks mounted to a
pavilion at the crest; and there, through the late
afternoon, he rested and gazed down at the Springs
or over to the village beyond. Alexander was
wearier than he had supposed ; the iron seemed sud
denly insupportably burdensome; a longing for
lighter, gayer contacts possessed him. He wanted
to enter the relaxations of the Springs.
Dancing, he knew, was customary after supper;
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and he lingered over a careful toilet — bright blue
coat, tight black trousers, and flat, glistening slip
pers, with a soft cambric ruffle. Alexander Hu-
lings surveyed his countenance in a scrap of mirror,
and saw, with mingled surprise and discontent,
that he — like Veneada — bore unmistakable signs of
age, marks of strife and suffering ; his whiskers had
an evident silvery sheen. Life, receding unnoticed,
had set him at the verge of middle age. But at
least, he thought, his was not an impotent medial
period; if, without material success, he had unex
pectedly seen the slightly drawn countenance meet
ing him in the mirror, he would have killed himself.
He realized that coldly. He could never have
survived an established nonentity. As it was,
descending the stairs to supper, immaculate and
disdainful, he was upheld by the memory of his
accomplishments, his widening importance, weight.
He actually heard a whispered comment: "Hulings,
iron."
[73]
VII
AFTER supper the furnishings of the dining
room were swept aside by a troop of
waiters, while a number of the latter, with
fiddles and cornets, were grouped on a table, over
which a green cloth had been spread. With the
inevitable scraping of strings and preliminary un
attended dance, a quadrille was formed. Alexan
der, lounging with other exactly garbed males in
the doorway, watched with secret envy the partici
pants in the figures gliding from on'e to another.
As if from another life he recalled their names;
they were dancing Le Pantalon now; La Poulee
would follow; then the Pastorale and L'Ete.
Above the spreading gauze, the tulle and glace
silks of the women, immense candelabra of glass
pendants and candles shone and glittered; the
rustle of crinoline, of light passing feet, sounded
below the violins and blown cornets, the rich husky
voices calling the changes of the quadrille.
He was troubled by an obscure desire to be a
center of interest, of importance, for the graceful
feminine world about him. Sinnox, the man from
New Orleans, was bowing profoundly to his part
ner; a figure broke up into a general boisterous
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gallopading — girls, with flushed cheeks, swinging
curls, spun from masculine shoulder to shoulder.
The dance ended, and the floating, perfumed skirts
passed him in a soft flood toward the porch.
Without, the colonnade towered against a sky
bright with stars; the night was warm and still.
Alexander Hulings was lonely; he attempted to
detain the acquaintance met in the bar, but the
other, bearing a great bouquet of rosebuds in a
lace-paper cone, hurried importantly away. A
subdued barytone was singing: "Our Way Across
the Mountain, Ho!" The strains of a waltz, the
Carlotta-Grisi, drifted out, and a number of couples
answered its invitation.
A group at the iron railing across the foot of
the colonnade attracted his attention by its exces
sive gayety. The center, he saw, was a young
woman, with smooth bandeaux and loops of black
hair, and a goya lily caught below her ear. She
was not handsome, but her features were animated,
and her shoulders as finely white and sloping as
an alabaster vase.
It was not this that held his attention, but a sense
of familiarity, a feeling that he had seen her be
fore. He walked past the group, without plan,
and, meeting her gaze, bowed awkwardly in re
sponse to a hesitating but unmistakable smile of
recognition. Alexander stopped, and she imperi
ously waved him to join the number about her.
He was in a cold dread of the necessity of admit-
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ting, before so many, that he could not recall her
name; but obviously all that she desired was to
swell the circle of her admirers, for, beyond a
second nod, she ignored him.
The Southerner was at her shoulder, maintain
ing a steady flow of repartee, and Alexander envied
him his assured presence, his dark, distinguished
appearance. The man who had been indicated as
Sinnox' companion stood by Hulings, and the latter
conceived a violent prejudice for the other's meager
yellow face and spiderlike hand, employed with a
cheroot.
Alexander hoped that somebody would repeat
the name of the girl who had spoken to him. A
woman did, but only in the contracted, familiar
form of Gisela. . . . Gisela — he had heard that
too. Suddenly she affected to be annoyed; she
arched her fine brows and glanced about, her gaze
falling upon Alexander Hulings. Before he was
aware of her movement a smooth white arm was
thrust through his; he saw the curve of a pow
dered cheek, an elevated chin.
"Do take me out of this! " she demanded. "New
Orleans molasses is — well, too thick."
Obeying the gentle pressure of her arm, he led
her down the steps to the graveled expanse below.
She stopped by a figure of the Goddess of Health,
in filigree on mossy rocks, pouring water from an
urn. Her gown was glazed green muslin, with a
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mist of white tulle, shining with particles of silver.
The goya lily exhaled a poignant scent.
"I didn't really leave because of Mr. Sinnox,"
she admitted; "a pin was scratching, and I was
devoured with curiosity to know who you were,
where I had met "
Suddenly, in a flash of remembered misery, of
bitter resentment, he recognized her — Gisela, John
Wooddrop's daughter. The knowledge pinched
at his heart with malicious fingers ; the starry night,
the music and gala attire, his loneliness had be
trayed him into an unusual plasticity of being.
He delayed for a long breath, and then said dryly:
"I'm Alexander Hulings."
"Not " she half cried, startled. She drew
away from him, and her face grew cold. In the
silence that followed he was conscious of the flower's
perfume and the insistent drip of the water falling
from the urn. "But I haven't met you at all,"
she said; "I don't in the least know you." Her
attitude was insolent, and yet she unconsciously
betrayed a faint curiosity. "I think you lacked
delicacy to join my friends — to bring me out here! "
"I didn't," he reminded her; "you brought me."
Instantly he cursed such clumsy stupidity. Her
lower lip protruded disdainfully.
"Forgive me," she said, dropping a curtsy, "but
I needn't keep you."
She swept away across the gravel and up the
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stairs to the veranda. It was evident that the group
had not separated; for almost immediately there
rose a concerted laughter, a palpable mockery,
drifting out to Alexander.
His face was hot, his hands clenched in angry
resentment. More than anything else, he shrank
from being an object of amusement, of gibes. It
was necessary to his self-esteem to be met with
grave appreciation.
This was his first experience of the keen assaults
of social weapons, and it inflicted on him an extrav
agant suffering. His instinct was to retire far
ther into the night, only to return to his room when
the hotel was dark, deserted. But a second,
stronger impulse sent him deliberately after Gisela
Wooddrop, up the veranda stairs, and rigidly past
the group gazing at him with curious mirth.
An oil flare fixed above them shone down on the
lean, saturnine countenance of Partridge Sinnox.
The latter, as he caught Alexander Hulings' gaze,
smiled slightly.
That expression followed Alexander to his
cramped room; it mocked him as he viciously
pulled at the bell rope, desiring his servant; it was
borne up to him on the faint strains of the violins.
And in the morning it clouded his entire outlook.
Sinnox' smile expressed a contempt that Alexander
Hulings' spirit could not endure. From the first
he had been resentful of the Southerner's cheap
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prestige. He added the qualifying word as he de
scended to breakfast.
Sinnox, as a dueller, roused Hulings' impatience;
he had more than once faced impromptu death —
iron bars in the hands of infuriated employees, and
he had overborne them with a cold phrase. This
theatrical playing with pistols — cheap! Later, in
the crowded bar, he was pressed elbow to elbow
with Sinnox and his companion; and he automati
cally and ruthlessly cleared sufficient space for his
comfort. Sinnox' associate said, in remonstrance:
"Sir, there are others — perhaps more consider
able."
"Perhaps ! " Alexander Hulings carelessly agreed.
Sinnox gazed down on him with narrowed eyes.
"I see none about us," he remarked, "who would
have to admit the qualification."
Alexander's bitterness increased, became aggres
sive. He met Sinnox' gaze with a stiff, dangerous
scorn:
"In your case, at least, it needn't stand."
"Gentlemen," the third cried, "no more, I beg
of you." He grasped Alexander Hulings' arm.
"Withdraw!" he advised. "Mr. Sinnox' temper is
fatal. Beyond a certain point it cannot be leashed.
It has caused great grief. Gentlemen, I beg "
"Do you mean " Sinnox demanded, and his
face was covered by an even, dark flush to the
sweep of his hair.
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"Cheap!" Alexander's voice was sudden and un
premeditated.
The other's temper rose in a black passion; he
became so enraged that his words were mere un
intelligible gasps. His hand shook so that he
dropped a glass of rock-and-rye splintering on
the floor. "At once!" he finally articulated.
"Scurvy "
"This couldn't be helped," his companion pro
claimed, agitated. "I warned the other gentleman,
Mr. Sinnox is not himself in a rage, his record is
well known. He was elbowed aside by "
"Alexander Hulings!" that individual pro
nounced.
He was aware of the gaze of the crowding men
about him; already he was conscious of an admira
tion roused by the mere fact of his facing a notori
ous bully. Cheap! The director joined him.
"By heavens, Hulings, you're in dangerous
water. I understand you have no family."
"None!" Alexander stated curtly.
Illogically he was conscious of the scent of a
goya lily. Sinnox was propelled from the jbar,
and his friend reappeared and conferred with the
director.
"At once!" Hulings heard the former announce.
"Mr. Sinnox . . . unbearable!"
"Have you a case of pistols?" the director asked.
"Mr. Sinnox offers his. I believe there is a quiet
opening back of the bathhouse. But my earnest
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TUBAL CAIN
advice to you is to withdraw; you will be very
little blamed; this man is notorious, a professional
fighter. You have only to say "
Cheap! Alexander thought again, fretful at
having been involved in such a ridiculous affair.
He was even more deliberate than usual ; but, though
he was certain of his entire normality, the faces
about him resembled small, bobbing balloons.
Alexander finished his drink — surprised to find
himself still standing by the bar — and silently fol
lowed the director through the great hall of the
hotel out on to the veranda, and across the grass
to a spot hidden from the valley by the long, low
bulk of the bathing house.
Sinnox and his companion, with a polished
mahogany box, were already there; a small, curi
ous group congregated in the distance. Sinnox'
friend produced long pistols with silken-brown bar
rels and elegantly carved ivory stocks, into which
he formally rammed powder and balls. Alexander
Hulings was composed; but his fingers were cold,
slightly numb, and he rubbed them together an
grily. Not for an instant did he think that he
might be killed; other curious, faint emotions as
sailed him — long-forgotten memories of distant
years; Veneada's kindly hand on his shoulder; the
mule called Alexander because of its aptitude for
hard labor; John Wooddrop's daughter.
He saw that the pistols had been loaded; their
manipulator stood with them, butts extended, in his
[81]
TUBAL CAIN
grasp. He began a preamble of customary ex
planation, which he ended by demanding, for his
principal, an apology from Alexander Hulings.
The latter, making no reply, was attracted by Sin
nox' expression of deepening passion; the man's
face, he thought, positively was black. Partridge
Sinnox' entire body was twitching with rage. . . .
Curious, for a seasoned, famous dueller!
Suddenly Sinnox, with a broken exclamation,
swung on his heel, grasped one of the pistols in
his second's hands, and discharged it point-blank
at Alexander Hulings.
An instant confused outcry rose. Alexander
heard the term " Insane!" pronounced, as if in ex
tenuation, by Sinnox' friend. The latter held the
remaining, undischarged pistol out of reach; the
other lay on the ground before Partridge Sinnox.
Alexander's face was as grey as granite.
"That was the way he did it," he unconsciously
pronounced aloud.
He wondered slowly at the fact that he had been
unhit. Then, with his hand in a pocket, he walked
stiffly up to within a few feet of Sinnox, and pro
duced a small, ugly derringer, with one blunt bar
rel on top of the other.
At the stunning report that followed, the vicious,
stinging cloud of smoke, he seemed to wake. He
felt himself propelled away from the vicinity of
the bathhouse; low, excited exclamations beat upon
his ears: "Absolutely justified!" "Horrible at-
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tempt to murder!" "Get his nigger and things.
Best for the present." He impatiently shook him
self free from his small following.
"Did I kill him?" he demanded.
There was an affirmative silence.
In his wagon, driving rapidly toward Tubal
Cain, a sudden sense of horror, weakness, overtook
him; the roadside rocked beneath his vision.
"Mordecai," he said to his coachman, "I — I shot
a man, derringered him."
The negro was unmoved.
"Man 'at fool round you, he's bound to be
killed!" he asserted. "Yes, sir; he just throwed
himself right away!"
Alexander Hulings wondered how John Wood-
drop's daughter would be affected. At least, he
thought grimly, once more self-possessed, he had
put a stop to her laughter at his expense.
TS3T
VIII
IN the weeks that followed he devoted himself
energetically to the finishing of the mansion
in course of erection above Tubal Cain. It
was an uncompromising, square edifice of brick,
with a railed belvedere on the roof, and a front
lawn enclosed by a cast-iron fence. On each side
of the path dividing the sod were wooden Chinese
pagodas like those he had seen at the Mineral
Springs; masoned rings for flower beds, and fern
eries, artificially heaped stones, with a fine spray
from concealed pipes. Rearing its solid bulk
against the living greenery of the forest, it was, he
told himself pridefully, a considerable dwelling.
Within were high walls and flowery ceilings, Italian
marble mantels and tall mirrors, black carved and
gilded furniture, and brilliant hassocks on thick-
piled carpet.
The greater part of the labor was performed by
the many skilled workmen now employed in his
furnaces and forges. He was utterly regardless of
cost, obligations; of money itself. Alexander had
always been impatient at the mere material fact
of wealth, of the possession and the accumulation
of sheer gold. To him it was nothing more than a
lever by which he moved men and things; it was a
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TUBAL CAIN
ladder that carried him above the unnoticed and
unnotable. He could always get money, at need,
from men or iron ; to debts he never gave a thought
— when they fell due they were discharged or car
ried forward.
His reason for finishing his dwelling with such
elaboration was obscure. Veneada had laughed at
him, speaking of small Hulingses, but he harbored
no concrete purpose of marriage; there was even
no dominant feminine figure in his thoughts.
Perhaps faintly at times he caught the odor of a
goya lily; but that was probably due to the fact
that lilies were already blooming in the circular
conservatory of highly colored glass attached to
his veranda.
The greater part of the house was darkened,
shrouded in linen. He would see, when walking
through the hall, mysterious and shadowy vistas,
lengthened endlessly in the long mirrors, of dusky
carpet and alabaster and ormolu, the faint glitter
of the prisms hung on the mantel lamps. Clocks
would strike sonorously in the depths of halls,
with the ripple of cathedral chimes. He had a
housekeeper, a stout person in oiled curls, and a
number of excessively humble negro servants.
Alexander Hulings got from all this an acute pleas
ure. It, too, was a mark of his success.
He had, below, on the public road, a small edi
fice of one room, which formed his office, and there
he saw the vast number of men always consulting
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with him; he never took them above to his house.
And when they dined with him it was at the hotel,
newly built by the packet station on the canal —
functions flooded with the prodigal amounts of
champagne Hulings thought necessary to his im
portance.
Most of his days were spent in his road wagon,
in which he traveled to Pittsburgh, West Virginia,
Philadelphia, where he had properties or interests.
In the cities of his associates he also avoided their
homes, and met them in hotels, discussed the terms
of business in bars or public parlors. With wo
men of position he was at once indifferent and ill
at ease, constantly certain that he was not appear
ing to good advantage, and suspecting their asides
and enigmatic smiles. He was laboriously, stiffly
polite, speaking in complimentary flourishes that
sometimes ended in abrupt constraint. At this,
afterward, he would chafe, and damn the superior
airs of women.
He had returned from such an expedition to
Wheeling, and was sitting in his office, when a
vehicle pulled up before his door. Deliberate feet
approached, and John Wooddrop entered. The
latter, Alexander realized enviously, was an exces
sively handsome old man; he had a commanding
height and a square, highly colored countenance,
with close white sideburns and vigorous silver hair.
His manner, too, was assured and easy. He
greeted Alexander Hulings with a keen, open smile.
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TUBAL CAIN
"Everything is splendid here!" he proclaimed.
"I looked in that chafery down stream, and the
metal was worked like satin. Fine weather for
the furnaces — rain's ugly; a furnace is like a
young girl."
Hulings wondered — contained and suspicious —
what the other wanted. Wooddrop, though they
passed each other frequently on the road, had not
saluted him since the completion of Glory Furnace.
He thought for a moment that already the older
man was feeling the pinch of fuel scarcity and that
he had come to beg for timber. In such a case
Alexander Hulings decided coldly that he would
not sell Wooddrop an ell of forest. In addition
to the fact that the complete success of one or the
other depended ultimately on his rival's failure, he
maintained a personal dislike of John Wooddrop;
he had never forgotten the humiliation forced on
him long before, in the dining room of the packet,
the Hit or Miss; he could not forgive Wooddrop's
preeminence in the iron field. The latter was a
legend of the manufacture of iron.
However, any idea of the other's begging privi
lege was immediately banished by John Wood-
drop's equable bearing. He said:
"I want to speak to you, Hulings, about a rather
delicate matter. In a way it is connected with my
daughter, Gisela. You saw her, I believe, at the
Springs."
Alexander Hulings somberly inclined his head.
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"Of course," Wooddrop continued, "I heard
about the difficulty you had with that Louisiana
bravo. I understand you acted like a man of
spirit and were completely exonerated; in fact, I
had some small part in quashing legal complica
tions. This was done not on your account, but
because of Gisela, who confided to me that she
held herself in blame. Mr. Hulings," he said
gravely, "my feeling for my daughter is not the
usual affection of parent for child. My wife is
dead. Gisela But I won't open a personal
subject with you. I spoke as I did merely, in a
way, to prepare you for what follows. My daugh
ter felt that she did you a painful wrong; and I
have come, in consequence, to offer you my good
will. I propose that we end our competition and
proceed together, for the good of both. Consoli
dated, we should inevitably control the iron situa
tion in our state; you are younger, more vigorous
than myself, and I have a certain prestige. Sir,
I offer you the hand of friendly cooperation."
Alexander Hulings' gaze narrowed as he studied
the man before him. At first, he had searched for
an ulterior motive, need, in Wooddrop's proposal;
but he quickly saw that the proposal had been com
pletely stated. Illogically he thought of black
ringleted hair and glazed muslin; he heard the echo
of water dripping from a stone urn. Lost in mem
ories, he was silent, for so long that John Wood-
drop palpably grew impatient. He cleared his
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throat sharply; but Hulings didn't shift a muscle.
Alexander was thinking now of the order he had
filled the first summer at Tubal Cain, of his bru
tal labor and bitter, deferred aspirations. His
rise, alone, had been at the price of ceaseless strug
gle; it was not yet consummated; but it would be
— it must, and still alone. Nothing should rob
him of the credit of his accomplishment; no person
coupled with him might reduce or share his tri
umph. What he said sounded inexcusably harsh
after the other's open manner.
"Only," he said, "only if the amalgamated in
dustries bear my name — the Alexander Hulings
Iron works. "
John Wooddrop's face darkened as he compre
hended the implied insult to his dignity and posi
tion. He rose, so violently thrusting back the
chair in which he had been sitting, that it fell with
a clatter.
"You brass trumpet!" he ejaculated. "You in
tolerable little bag of vanity! Will you never see
yourself except in a glass of flattery or intolerable
self-satisfaction? It would be impossible to say
which you inspire most, contempt or pity."
Strangely enough, Hulings didn't resent the
language applied to him. He gazed at Wooddrop
without anger. The other's noise, he thought, was
but a symptom of his coming downfall. He was
slowly but surely drawing the rope about the throat
of Wooddrop's industries.
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"Absolutely the last time," the other stuttered.
"Now you can go to hell on your own high horse!
Blinded by your own fatuousness — don't see where
the country is running. You may impose on
others, but I know your business, sir; and it's as
hollow as a tin plate stove. The times will soon
kick it in."
John Wooddrop stamped away from Hulings in
a rage.
[90]
IX
THAT evening Alexander Hulings wondered
what Gisela had told her father; he won-
ered more vaguely what she had thought of
him — what, if at all, she still thought. He had
had a formal room illuminated for his cigar after
dinner; and he sat, a small, precise figure, with
dust-colored hair and a somber, intent countenance,
clasping a heavy roll of expensive tobacco, in a
crimson plush chair. The silence, the emptiness
about him was filled with rich color, ponderous
maroon draperies, marble slabs and fretted tulip-
wood.
It suddenly struck him that, by himself, he was
slightly ridiculous in such opulence. His house
needed a mistress, a creature of elegance to preside
at his table, to exhibit in her silks and jewels an
other sign of his importance. Again, as if from
the conservatory, he caught a faint poignant per
fume.
Gisela Wooddrop was a person of distinction,
self-possessed and charming. There was a subtle
flavor in thus considering her father's daughter —
old Wooddrop's girl — and himself. He rose and
walked to a mirror, critically surveying his coun
tenance; yes, it was well marked by age, yet it
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TUBAL CAIN
was sharp in outline; his step was springy; he felt
none of the lassitude of increasing years.
He was in his prime. Many young women
would prefer him, his house and name, to the windy
pretensions of youthful scapegoats. A diamond
necklace was a convincing form of courtship.
There was no absolute plan in his thoughts that
night; but, in the dry romantic absorption of the
days that followed, a fantastic purpose formed and
increased — he determined to marry Gisela Wood-
drop.
He had for this, he assured himself, some slight
encouragement; it was patent that her father had
entirely misread the girl's intent in suggesting an
end to the hostilities which had made impossible
any social intercourse. She was interested in him;
the duel with Sinnox had captured her imagination.
Women responded surprisingly to such things.
Then she had held that it had been partly her fault !
Now it seemed to him that he understood why he
had built so elaborately since his return from the
Mineral Springs; unconsciously — all the while —
it had been for his wife, for Gisela.
There were great practical difficulties in the
realization of his desire, even in his opportunity to
present his question; to see Gisela Wooddrop long
enough and sufficiently privately to explain all he
hoped. He was, too, far past the age of romantic
assignations, episodes; he could no more decorate
a moonlit scene beneath a window. Alexander
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TUBAL CAIN
must not count on adventitious assistance from
emotional setting: his offer could carry only its
grave material solidity. Often he laughed curtly
at what momentarily seemed an absurd fantasy, a
madness approaching senility; then his pride would
flood back, reassert the strength of his determina
tion, ithe desirability of Alexander Hulings.
[93]
THE occasion evaded him; the simplicity of
his wish, of the bald relationship between
the Wooddrops and Tubal Cain, prevent
ing it more surely than a multiplication of barriers,
He never considered the possibility of a compromise
with John Wooddrop, a retreat from his position.
Alexander thought of Gisela as a possible addition
to his dignity and standing — of the few women he
had seen she possessed the greatest attractions —
and he gave no thought of a sacrifice to gain her.
She was to be a piece with the rest of his success —
a wife to honor his mansion, to greet a selected few
of his friends, and wear the gold and jewels pur
chased by the Hulings iron.
He made no overt attempt to see her, but waited
for opportunity. Meantime he had commenced to
think of her in terms of passionless intimacy.
Alexander Hulings was a solitary man; except for
his industrial activity his mind was empty; and
Gisela Wooddrop quickly usurped the hours after
dinner, the long drives through massed and un-
scarred forests. He recalled her minutely — every
expression that he had seen, every variation of
dress. Wooddrop's daughter was handsomely
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TUBAL CAIN
provided for; but Alexander Hillings' wife would
be a revelation in luxury. In New York he bought
a pair of India cashmere shawls, paying a thou
sand dollars for them, and placed them on a chair,
ready.
The weeks multiplied; and he got such pleasure
from the mere thought of Gisela sweeping through
his rooms, accompanying him to Philadelphia,
shining beside him at the opera, that he became
almost reluctant to force the issue of her choice.
He was more than customarily careful with his
clothes; his silk hats were immaculate; his trousers
ranged in color from the most delicate sulphur to
astounding London checks ; he had his yellow boots
polished with champagne, his handkerchiefs scented
with essence of nolette and almond. For all this,
his countenance was none the less severe, his apti
tude for labor untouched; he followed every detail
of iron manufacture, every improved process, every
shift in the market.
The valley about Tubal Cain now resembled a
small, widely scattered town; the dwellings of Hu-
lings' workmen extended to the property line of the
Blue Lump Furnace ; roads were cut, bridges thrown
across the stream. The flutter of wings, the pour
ing birdsong and vale of green, that Alexander had
found had given place to a continuous, shattering
uproar day and night; the charging of furnaces,
the dull thunder of the heavy wagons of blooms,
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the jangle of shingling sledges and monotonous
fall of trip hammers, mingled and rose in a stridu-
lous volume to the sky, accompanied by chemical
vapors, uprushing cinders and the sooty smoke of
the forges. A company store had been built and
stocked, and grimy troops of laborers were per
petually gathered, off shift, by its face.
Harmony itself, the station on the canal, had
expanded; the new hotel, an edifice of brick with
a steep slate roof and iron grilling, faced a rival
saloon and various emporia of merchandise. An
additional basin had been cut in the bank for the
loading of Alexander Hillings' iron on to the canal
boats.
He had driven to the canal — it was early sum
mer — to see about a congestion of movement; and,
hot, he stopped in the hotel for a pint of wine in
a high glass with cracked ice. The lower floor
was cut in half by a hall and stairs; on the right
the bar opened on the narrow porch, while at the
left a ladies' entrance gave way to the inevitable
dark, already musty parlor. The bar was crowded,
and, intolerant of the least curtailment of his dig
nity or comfort, he secured his glass and moved
across the hall to the stillness of the parlor.
A woman was standing, blurred in outline, at
one of the narrow windows. She turned as he
entered; he bowed, prepared to withdraw, when he
saw that it was Gisela Wooddrop. She wore white
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muslin, sprigged in orange chenille, with green
ribbons, and carried a green parasol. Alexander
stood motionless in the doorway, his champagne in
one hand and a glossy stovepipe hat in the other.
He was aware of a slight inward confusion, but
outwardly he was unmoved, exact. Gisela, too,
maintained the turn of her flexible body, her hands
on the top of the parasol. Under her bonnet her
face was pale, her eyes noticeably bright. Alex
ander Hulings said:
"Good afternoon!"
He moved into the room. Gisela said nothing;
she was like a graceful painted figure on a shadowy
background. A complete ease possessed Alex
ander.
"Miss Wooddrop," he continued, in the vein
of a simple statement. She nodded automatically.
"This is a happy meeting — for me. I can now
express my gratitude for your concern about a cer
tain unfortunate occurrence at the Mineral Springs.
At the same time, I regret that you were caused the
slightest uneasiness."
She shuddered delicately.
"Nothing more need be said about that," she
told him. "I explained to my father; but I was
sorry afterward that I did it, and — and put him to
fresh humiliation."
"There," he gravely replied, "little enough can
be discussed. It has to do with things that you
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would have limited patience with, strictly an affair
of business. I was referring to your susceptibility
of heart, a charming female quality."
He bowed stiffly. Gisela came nearer to him,
a sudden emotion trembling on her features.
"Why don't you end it?" she cried, low and dis
tressed. "It has gone on a long while now — the
bitterness between you; I am certain in his heart
father is weary of it, and you are younger "
She broke off before the tightening of his lips.
"Not a topic to be developed here," he insisted.
He had no intention, Alexander Hulings thought,
of being bent about even so charming a finger.
And it was well to establish at once the manner in
which any future they might share should be con
ducted. He wanted a wife, not an intrigante nor
Amazon. Her feeling, color, rapidly evaporated,
and left her pallid, confused, before his calm de
meanor. She turned her head away, her face lost
in the bonnet, but slowly her gaze returned to meet
his keen inquiry. His impulse was to ask her,
then, at once, to marry him; but he restrained that
headlong course, feeling that it would startle her
into flight. As it was, she moved slowly toward
the door.
"I am to meet a friend on the Western packet,"
she explained; "I thought I heard the horn."
"It was only freight," he replied. "I should
be sorry to lose this short opportunity to pay you
my respects; to tell you that you have been a lot
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in my thoughts lately. I envy the men who see
you casually, whenever they choose."
She gazed at him with palpable surprise gather
ing in her widely opened eyes. "But," she said
breathlessly, "everybody knows that you never ad
dress a polite syllable to a woman. It is more
speculated on than any of your other traits."
He expanded at this indication of a widespread
discussion of his qualities.
"I have had no time for merely polite speeches,"
he responded. "And I assure you that I am not
only complimentary now; I mean that I am not
saluting you with vapid elegance. I am awaiting
only a more fitting occasion to speak further."
She circled him slowly, with a minute whispering
of crinoline, her gaze never leaving his face. Her
muslin, below her white, bare throat, circled by a
black velvet band, was heaving. The parasol fell
with a clatter. He stooped immediately; but she
was before him and snatched it up, with crimson
cheeks.
"They say that you are the most hateful man
alive! " she half breathed.
"Who are 'they'?" he demanded contemptuously.
"Men I have beaten and women I failed to see.
That hatred grows with success, with power; it is
never wasted on the weak. My competitors would
like to see me fall into a furnace stack — the men
I have climbed over, and my debtors. They are
combining every month to push me to the wall, a
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dozen of them together, yelping like a pack of dogs.
But they haven't succeeded; they never will!"
His words were like the chips from an iron bloom.
"They never will," he repeated harshly, "and I have
only begun. I want you to see my house sometime.
I planned a great part of it with you in mind. No
money was spared. ... I should be happy to
have you like it. I think of it as yours."
All the time he was speaking she was stealing by
imperceptible degrees toward the door; but at his
last, surprising sentence she stood transfixed with
mingled wonder and fear. She felt behind her for
the open doorway and rested one hand against the
woodwork. A ribald clatter sounded from the bar,
and without rose the faint, clear note of an ap
proaching packet. Her lips formed for speech, but
only a slight gasp was audible; then her spreading
skirts billowed through the opening, and she was
gone.
Alexander Hulings found that he was still hold
ing his silk hat; he placed it carefully on the table
and took a deep drink from the iced glass. He
was conscious of a greater feeling of triumph than
he had ever known before. He realized that he
had hardly needed to add the spoken word to the
impression his being had made on Gisela Wood-
drop. He had already invaded her imagination;
the legend of his struggle and growth had taken
possession of her. There remained now only a
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formal declaration, the outcome of which "he felt
almost certain would be in his favor.
Again in his house, he inspected the silk hang
ings of the particularly feminine chambers. He
trod the thick carpets with a keen anticipation of
her exclamations of pleasure, her surprise at con
venient trifle after trifle. In the stable he surveyed
a blooded mare she might take a fancy to; he must
buy a light carriage, with a fringed canopy — yes,
and put a driver into livery. Women liked such
things.
At dinner he speculated on the feminine palate;
he liked lean mountain venison, and a sherry that
left almost a sensation of dust on the tongue; but
women preferred sparkling hock and pastry, fruit
preserved in white brandy, and pagodas of barley
sugar.
Through the open windows came the subdued
clatter of his forges; the hooded candles on the
table flickered slightly in a warm eddy, while cor
responding shadows stirred on the heavy napery,
the Sheffield, and delicate creamy Belleek of his
dinner service — the emblem of his certitude and
pride.
[101]
XI
IN October Alexander Hulings took Gisela
Wooddrop to the home that had been so
largely planned for her enjoyment. They
had been married in a private parlor of the United
States Hotel, in Philadelphia; and after a small
supper had gone to the Opera House to see "Love
in a Village," followed by a musical pasticcio.
Gisela's mother had died the winter before, and
she was attended by an elderly distant cousin; no
one else was present at the wedding ceremony ex
cept a friend of Gisela's — a girl who wept copiously
— and Doctor Veneada. The latter's skin hung in
loose folds, like a sack partially emptied of its
contents; his customary spirit had evaporated too;
and he sat through the wedding supper neither eat
ing nor speaking, save for the forced proposal of
the bride's health.
Gisela Wooddrop and Alexander Hulings, meet
ing on a number of carefully planned, apparently
accidental occasions, had decided to be married
while John Wooddrop was confined to his room by
severe gout. In this manner they avoided the un
pleasant certainty of his refusal to attend his
daughter's, and only child's, wedding. Gisela had
not told Alexander Hulings what the aging Iron-
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master had said when necessarily informed of her
purpose. No message had come to Alexander from
John Wooddrop; since the ceremony the Hulingses
had had no sign of the other's existence.
Alexander surveyed his wife with huge satisfac
tion as they sat for the first time at supper in their
house. She wore white, with the diamonds he had
given her about her firm young throat, black-enamel
bracelets on her wrists, and her hair in a gilt net.
She sighed with deep pleasure.
"It's wonderful!" she proclaimed, and then cor
roborated all he had surmised about the growth of
her interest in him; it had reached forward and
back from the killing of Partridge Sinnox. "That
was the first time," she told him, "that I realized
you were so — so big. You looked so miserable on
the canal boat, coming out here those years ago,
that it hardly seemed possible for you merely to
live; and when you started the hearths at Tubal
Cain everyone who knew anything about iron just
laughed at you — we used to go down sometimes and
look at those killing workmen you had, and that
single mule and old horse.
"I wasn't interested then, and I don't know
when it happened; but now I can see that a time
soon came when men stopped laughing at you. I
can just remember when father first became seri
ously annoyed, when he declared that he was going
to force you out of the valleys at once. But it
seemed you didn't go. And then in a few months
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he came home in a dreadful temper, when he found
that you controlled all the timber on the mountains.
He said of course you would break before he was
really short of charcoal. But it seems you haven't
broken. And now I'm married to you; I'm Gisela
Hulings!"
"This is hardly more than the beginning," he
added; "the foundation — just as iron is the base for
so much. I — we — are going on," he corrected the
period lamely, but was rewarded by a charming
smile. "Power!" he said, shutting up one hand,
his straight, fine features as hard as the cameo in
his neckcloth.
She instantly fired at his tensity of will.
"How splendid you are, Alexander!" she cried.
"How tremendously satisfactory for a woman to
share ! You can have no idea what it means to be
with a man like a stone wall !
"I wish," she said, "that you would always tell
me about your work. I'd like more than anything
else to see you going on, step by step up. I sup
pose it is extraordinary in a woman. I felt that
way about father's iron, and he only laughed at
me; and yet once I kept a forge daybook almost a
week, when a clerk was ill. I think I could be of
real assistance to you, Alexander."
He regarded with the profoundest distaste any
mingling of his, Alexander Hulings', wife and a
commercial industry. He had married in order to
give his life a final touch of elegance and proper
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symmetry. No, no; he wanted Gisela to receive
him at the door of his mansion, in -fleckless white,
as she was now, and jewels, at the end of his day
in the clamor and soot of business and put it tem
porarily from his thoughts.
He was distinctly annoyed that her father had
permitted her to post the forge book; it was an
exceedingly unladylike proceeding. He told her
something of this in carefully chosen, deliberate
words; and she listened quietly, but with a faint
air of disappointment.
"I want you to buy yourself whatever you fancy,"
he continued; "nothing is too good for you — for
my wife. I am very proud of you and insist on
your making the best appearance, wherever we are.
Next year, if <the political weather clears at all,
we'll go to Paris, and you can explore the mantua-
makers there. You got the shawls in your dressing
room?"
She hesitated, cutting uncertainly with a heavy
silver knife at a crystallized citron.
Then, with an expression of determination, she
addressed him again:
"But don't you see that it is your power, your
success over men, that fascinates me; that first
made me think of you? In a way this is not —
not an ordinary affair of ours ; I had other chances
more commonplace, which my father encouraged,
but they seemed so stupid that I couldn't entertain
them. I love pretty clothes, Alexander; I adore
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TUBAL CAIN
the things you've given me; but will you mind my
saying that that isn't what I married you for? I
am sure you don't care for such details, for money
itself, in the least. You are too strong. And that
is why I did marry you, why I love to think about
you, and what I want to follow, to admire and
understand."
He was conscious of only a slight irritation at
this masculine-sounding speech; he must have no
hesitation in uprooting such ideas from his wife's
thoughts; they detracted from her feminine charm,
struck at the bottom of her duties, her privileges
and place.
"At the next furnace in blast," he told her with
admirable control, "the workmen will insist on
your throwing in, as my bride, a slipper; and in
that way you can help the charge."
Then, by planning an immediate trip with her
to West Virginia, he abruptly brought the discus
sion to a close.
Alexander was pleased, during the weeks which
followed, at the fact that she made no further
reference to iron. She went about the house,
gravely busy with its maintenance, as direct and
efficient as he was in the larger realm. Almost her
first act was to discharge the housekeeper. The
woman came to Alexander, her fat face smeared
with crying, and protested bitterly against the loss
of a place she had filled since the house was roofed.
He was, of course, curt with her, and ratified
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TUBAL CAIN
Gisela's decision; but privately he was annoyed.
He had not even intended his wife to discharge the
practical duties of living — thinking of her as a
suave figure languidly moving from parlor to
dining room or boudoir; however, meeting her in
a hall, energetically directing the dusting of a
cornice, in a rare flash of perception he said
nothing.
[107]
XII
HE would not admit, even to himself, that
his material affairs were less satisfactory
than they had been the year before, but
such he vaguely knew was a fact. Speculation in
Western government lands, large investments in
transportation systems for the present fallow, had
brought about a general condition of commercial
unrest. Alexander Hulings felt this, not only by
the delayed payment for shipments of metal, but
in the allied interests he had accumulated. Mer
chandise was often preceded by demands for pay
ment; the business of a nail manufactory he owned
in Wheeling had been cut in half.
He could detect concern in the shrewd coun
tenance and tones of Samuel Cryble, a hard-headed
Yankee from a Scotch Protestant valley in New
Hampshire, who had risen to the position of his
chief assistant and, in a small way, copartner.
They sat together in the dingy office on the public
road and silently, grimly, went over invoices and
payments, debts and debtors. It was on such an
occasion that Alexander had word of the death of
Doctor Veneada.
Hulings' involuntary concern, the stirred mem
ories of the dead man's liberal spirit and mind —
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TUBAL CAIN
he had been the only person Alexander Hulings
could call friend — speedily gave place to a growing
anxiety as to how Veneada might have left his
affairs. He had been largely a careless man in
practical matters.
Alexander had never satisfied the mortgage he
had granted Veneada on the timber properties
purchased with the other man's money. He had
tried to settle the indebtedness when it had first
fallen due, but the doctor had begged him to let
the money remain as it was.
"I'll only throw it away on some confounded
soft-witted scheme, Alex," he had insisted. "With
you, I know where it is; it's a good investment."
Now Hulings recalled that the second extension
had expired only a few weeks before Veneada's
death, incurring an obligation the settlement of
which he had been impatiently deferring until he
saw the other.
He had had a feeling that Veneada, with no
near or highly regarded relatives, would will him
the timber about the valleys; yet he was anxious
to have the thing settled. The Alexander Hulings
Company was short of available funds. He re
turned to Eastlake for Veneada's funeral; and
there, for the first time, he saw the cousins to whom
the doctor had occasionally and lightly alluded.
They were, he decided, a lean and rapacious crew.
He remained in Eastlake for another twenty-four
hours, but was forced to leave with nothing dis-
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TUBAL CAIN
covered; and it was not until a week later that,
again in his office, he learned that Veneada had
made no will. This, it seemed, had been shown
beyond any doubt. He rose, walked to a dusty
window, and gazed out unseeingly at an eddy of
dead leaves and dry metallic snow in a bleak
November wind.
After a vague, disconcerted moment he shrewdly
divined exactly what would occur. He said
nothing to Cryble, seated with his back toward him;
and even Gisela looked with silent inquiry at his
absorption throughout supper. She never ques
tioned him now about any abstraction that might be
concerned with affairs outside their pleasant life
together.
The inevitable letter at last arrived, announcing
the fact that, in a partition settlement of Veneada's
estate by his heirs, it was necessary to settle the
expired mortgage. It could not have come, he
realized, at a more inconvenient time.
He was forced to discuss the position with
Cryble; and the latter heard him to the end with
a narrowed, searching vision.
"That money out of the business now might
leave us on the bank," he asserted. "As I see it,
there's but one thing to do — go over all the timber,
judge what we actually will need for coaling, buy
that — or, if we must, put another mortgage on it —
and let the rest, a good two-thirds, go."
This, Alexander acknowledged to himself, was
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TUBAL CAIN
the logical if not the only course. And then John
Wooddrop would purchase the remainder ; he would
have enough charcoal to keep up his local in
dustries beyond his own life and another. All
his — Alexander's — planning, aspirations, sacrifice,
would have been for nothing. He would never,
like John Wooddrop, be a great industrial despot,
or command, as he had so often pictured, the iron
situation of the state. To do that, he would have
to control all the iron the fumes of whose manu
facture stained the sky for miles about Harmony.
If Wooddrop recovered an adequate fuel supply
Alexander Hulings would never occupy a position
of more than secondary importance.
There was a bare possibility of his retaining all
the tracts again by a second mortgage; but as he
examined that, it sank from a potentiality to a
thing without substance. It would invite an in
vestigation, a public gleaning of facts, that he must
now avoid. His pride could not contemplate the
publication of the undeniable truth — that what he
had so laboriously built up stood on an insecure
foundation.
"It is necessary," he said stiffly, "in order to
realize on my calculations, that I continue to hold
all the timber at present in my name."
"And that's where you make a misjudgment,"
Cryble declared, with an equal bluntness. "I can
see clear enough that you are letting your personal
feeling affect your business sense. There is room
tin]
TUBAL CAIN
enough in Pennsylvania for both you and old Wood-
drop. Anyhow, there's got to be somebody second
in the parade, and that is a whole lot better than
tail end."
Alexander Hulings nodded absently; Cryble's
philosophy was correct for a clerk, an assistant,
but Alexander Hulings felt the tyranny of a wider
necessity. He wondered where he could get the
money to satisfy the claim of the doctor's heirs.
His manufacturing interests in West Virginia, de
preciated as they were at present, would about
cover the debt. Ordinarily they were worth a third
more ; and in ten years they would double in value.
He relentlessly crushed all regret at parting with
what was now his best property and promptly made
arrangements to secure permanently the timberland.
Soon, he felt, John Wooddrop must feel the
pinch of fuel shortage; and Alexander awaited
such development with keen attention. As he had
anticipated, when driving from the canal, he saw
that the Blue Lump Furnace had gone out of blast,
its workmen dispersed. Gisela, the day before,
had been to see her father; and he was curious
to hear what she might report. A feeling of
coming triumph, of inevitable worldly expansion,
settled comfortably over him, and he regarded his
wife pleasantly through a curtain of cigar smoke.
They were seated in a parlor, already shadowy
with an early February dusk; coals were burning
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TUBAL CAIN
brightly in a polished open stove, by which Gisela
was embroidering in brightly colored wool on a
frame. She had the intent, placid expression of
a woman absorbed in a small, familiar duty. As
he watched her Alexander Hillings' satisfaction
deepened — young and fine and vigorous, she was
preeminently a wife for his importance and posi
tion. She gazed at him vacantly, her eyes crinkled
at the corners, her lips soundlessly counting
stitches, and a faint smile rose to his lips.
He was anxious to hear what she might say
about John Wooddrop, and yet a feeling of pro
priety restrained him from a direct question. He
had not had a line, a word or message, from Wood-
drop since he had married the other's daughter.
The aging man, he knew, idolized Gisela; and her
desertion — for so John Wooddrop would hold it —
must have torn the Ironmaster. She had, how
ever, been justified in her choice, he contentedly
continued nis train of thought. Gisela had every
thing a woman could wish for. He had been a
thoughtful husband. Her clothes, of the most
beautiful texture and design, were pinned with
jewels; her deftly moving fingers flashed with
rings; the symbol of his success, his
"My father looks badly, Alexander," she said
suddenly. "I wish you would see him, and that
he would talk to you. But you won't and he won't.
He is very nearly as stubborn as yourself. I wish
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TUBAL CAIN
you could make a move; after all, you are younger.
. . . But then, you would make each other furious
in a second." She sighed deeply.
"Has he shown any desire to see me?"
"No," she admitted. "You must know he
thinks you married me only to get his furnaces;
he is ridiculous about it — just as if you needed
any more! He has been fuming and planning a
hundred things since his charcoal has been getting
low."
She stopped and scrutinized her embroidery, a
naive pattern of rose and urn and motto. He drew
a long breath; that was the first tangible indication
he had had of the working out of his planning, the
justification of his sacrifice.
"I admire father," she went on once more, con
versationally; "my love for you hasn't blinded me
to his qualities. He has a surprising courage and
vigor for an Why, he must be nearly seventy!
And now he has the most extraordinary plan for
what he calls 'getting the better of you.' He was
as nice with me as possible, but I could see that
he thinks you're lost this time. . . . No, the darker
green. Alexander, don't you think the words
would be sweet in magenta?"
"Well," he demanded harshly, leaning forward,
"what is this plan?"
She looked up, surprised at his hard impatience.
"How queer you are! And that's your iron
expression; you know it's expressly forbidden in
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TUBAL CAIN
the house, after hours. His plan? I'm certain
there's no disloyalty in telling you. Isn't it mad,
at his age? And it will cost him an outrageous
amount of money. He is going to change the en
tire system of all his forges and furnaces. It
seems stone coal has been found on his slopes; and
he is going to blow in with that, and use a hot
blast in his smelting."
Alexander Hulings sat rigid, motionless; the
cigar in his hand cast up an unbroken blue ribbon
of smoke. Twice he started to speak, to exclaim
incredulously; but he uttered no sound. It seemed
that all his planning had been utterly overthrown,
ruined; in a manner which he — anyone — could
not have foreseen. The blowing in of furnaces
with hard coal had developed since his entrance
into the iron field. It had not been generally de
clared successful; the pig produced had been so
impure that, with working in an ordinary or even
puddling forge, it had often to be subjected to a
third, finery fire. But he had been conscious of a
slow improvement in the newer working; he had
vaguely acknowledged that sometime anthracite
would displace charcoal for manufacturing pur
poses; in future years he might adopt it himself.
But John Wooddrop had done it before him; all
the square miles of timber that he had acquired
with such difficulty, that he had retained at the
sacrifice of his best property, would be worthless.
The greater part of it could not be teamed across
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TUBAL CAIN
Wooddrop's private roads or hauled advantage
ously over a hundred intervening streams and
miles. It was all wasted, lapsed — his money and
dreams !
"It will take over a year," she went on. "I
don't understand it at all; but it seems that sending
a hot blast into a furnace, instead of the cold, keeps
the metal at a more even temperature. Father's
so interested you'd think he was just starting out in
life — though, really, he is an old man." She
laughed. "Competition has been good for him."
All thrown away; in vain! Alexander Hulings
wondered what acidulous comment Cryble would
make. There were no coal deposits on his land,
its nature forbade that; besides, he had no money
to change the principal of his drafts. He gazed
about at the luxury that surrounded Gisela and
himself; there was no lien on the house, but there
still remained some thousands of dollars to pay on
the carpets and fixtures. His credit, at least, was
unimpeachable; decorators, tradespeople of all
sorts, had been glad to have him in their debt.
But if any whisper of financial stringency escaped,
a horde would be howling about his gate, demand
ing the settlement of their picayune accounts.
The twilight had deepened; the fire made a
ruddy area in the gloom, into the heart of which he
flung his cigar. His wife embroidered serenely.
As he watched her, noting her firm, well-modeled
features, realizing her utter unconsciousness of all
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TUBAL CAIN
that he essentially at that moment was, he felt a
strange sensation of loneliness, of isolation.
Alexander Hulings had a sudden impulse to take
her into his confidence; to explain everything to
her — the disaster that had overtaken his project
of ultimate power, the loss of the West Virginia
interest, the tightness of money. He had a feeling
that she would not be a negligible adviser — he had
been a witness of her efficient management of his
house — and he felt a craving for the sympathy she
would instantly extend.
Alexander parted his lips to inform her of all
that had occurred; but the habit of years, the in
nate fiber of his being, prevented. A wife, he
reminded himself, a woman, had no part in the
bitter struggle for existence; it was not becoming
for her to mingle with the affairs of men. She
should be purely a creature of elegance, of solace,
and, dressed in India muslin or vaporous silk,
ornament a divan, sing French or Italian songs at
a piano. The other was manifestly improper.
This, illogically, made him irritable with Gisela ;
she appeared, contentedly sewing, a peculiarly use
less appendage in his present stress of mind. He
was glum again at supper, and afterward retired
into an office he had had arranged on the ground
floor of the mansion. There he got out a number
of papers, accounts and pass books; but he spent
little actual time on them. He sat back in his
chair, with his head sunk low, and mind thronged
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TUBAL CAIN
with memories of the past, of his long, uphill
struggle against oblivion and ill health.
Veneada was gone; yes, and Conrad Wishon too
— the supporters and confidants of his beginning.
He himself was fifty years old. At that age a man
should be firmly established, successful, and not
deviled by a thousand unexpected mishaps. By
fifty a man's mind should be reasonably at rest,
his accomplishment and future secure; yet there
was nothing of security, but only combat, before
him.
Wooddrop had been a rich man from the start,
when he, Alexander Hulings, at the humiliating
failure of the law, had had to face life with a few
paltry hundreds. No wonder he had been obliged
to contract debts, to enter into impossibly onerous
agreements! Nothing but struggle ahead, a re
lentless continuation of the past years; and he had
reached, passed, his prime!
There, for a day, he had thought himself safe,
moving smoothly toward the highest pinnacles;
when, without warning, at a few words casually
pronounced over an embroidery frame, the entire
fabric of his existence had been rent! It was not
alone the fact of John Wooddrop's progressive
spirit that he faced, but now a rapidly accumulat
ing mass of difficulties. He was dully amazed at
the treacherous shifting of life, at the unheralded
change of apparently solid ground for quicksand.
[118]
XIII
FTT1HOUGH the industries centered in Tubal
I Cain were operated and apparently owned
M by the Alexander Hulings Iron Company,
and Hulings was publicly regarded as their pro
prietor, in reality his hold on them was hardly
more than nominal. At the erection of the fur
naces and supplementary forges he had been
obliged to grant such rebates to the Columbus
Transportation interest in return for capital, he
had contracted to supply them at a minimum price
such a large proportion of his possible output, that,
with continuous shifts, he was barely able to dis
pose advantageously of a sixth of the year's manu
facture.
He had made such agreements confident that he
should ultimately control the Wooddrop furnaces;
when, doubling his resources, he would soon free
himself from conditions imposed on him by an
early lack of funds. Now it was at least problem
atic whether he would ever extend his power to
include the older man's domain. His marriage
with Gisela had only further separated them,
hardening John Wooddrop's resolve that Hulings
should never fire a hearth of his, a determination
[119]
TUBAL CAIN
strengthened by the rebuilding of Wooddrop's
furnaces for a stone-coal heat.
The widespread land speculation, together with
the variability of currency, now began seriously to
depress the country, and, more especially, Alexan
der Hulings. He went to Philadelphia, to Wash
ington, for conferences ; but returned to his mansion
and Gisela in an increasing somberness of mood.
All the expedients suggested, the legalizing of
foreign gold and silver, the gradual elimination of
the smaller state-bank notes, an extra coinage, one
after another failed in their purpose of stabiliza
tion; an acute panic was threatened.
Alexander was almost as spare of political
comments to his wife as he was of business discus
sion. That, too, he thought, did not become the
female poise. At times, bitter and brief, he con
demned the Administration; during dinner he all
but startled a servant into dropping a platter by
the unexpected violence of a period hurled at the
successful attempts to destroy the national bank.
And when, as — he declared — a result of that, the
state institutions refused specie payment, and a
flood of rapidly depreciating paper struck at the
base of commerce, Alexander gloomily informed
Gisela that the country was being sold for a barrel
of hard cider.
He had, with difficulty, a while before secured
what had appeared to be an advantageous order
from Virginia; and, after extraordinary effort, he
[120]
TUBAL CAIN
had delivered the iron. But during the lapsing
weeks, when the state banks refused to circulate
gold, the rate of exchange for paper money fell
so far that he lost all his calculated profit, and a
quarter of the labor as well. The money of other
states depreciated in Pennsylvania a third. In
addition to these things Alexander commenced to
have trouble with his workmen — wages, too, had
diminished, but their hours increased. Hulings,
like other commercial operators, issued printed
money of his own, good at the company store, use
ful in the immediate vicinity of Tubal Cain, but
valueless at any distance. Cryble, as he had an
ticipated, recounted the triumph of John Wood-
drop.
"The old man can't be beat!" he asserted.
" We've got a nice little business here. Tailed on
to Wooddrop's, we should do good; but you are
running it into an iron wall. You ain't content
with enough."
Cryble was apparently unconscious of the dan
gerous glitter that had come into Hulings' gaze.
Alexander listened quietly until the other had
finished, and then curtly released him from all
connection, , any obligation to himself. James
Cryble was undisturbed.
"I was thinking myself about a move," he
declared, "This concern is pointed bull-headed
on to destruction! You're a sort of peacock," he
further told Hulings; "you can't do much besides
[121]
TUBAL CAIN
spread and admire your own feathers. But you'll
get learned."
Alexander made no reply, and the other shortly
after disappeared from his horizon. Cryble, he
thought contemptuously, a man of routine, had no
more salience than one of the thousands of identi
cal iron pigs run from Glory Furnace. There
commenced now a period of toil more bitter, more
relentless, than his first experience in the valleys;
by constant effort he was able to keep just ahead
of the unprofitable labor for the Columbus Rail
road. The number of workmen grew constantly
smaller, vaguely contaminated by the unsettled
period, while his necessity increased. Again and
again he longed to strip off his coat and superfluous
linen and join the men working the metal in the
hearths; he would have felt better if he could have
had actual part in rolling and stamping the pig
beds, or even in dumping materials into the furnace
stack.
In the fever of Alexander Hulings' impatience
and concern, the manufacture of his iron seemed
to require months between the crude ore and the
finished bars and blooms. He detected a growing
impotence among laborers, and told them of it with
an unsparing, lashing tongue. A general hatred
of him again flashed into being; but it was still
accompanied by a respect amounting to fear.
He was approached, at a climax of misfortune,
by representatives of the railroad. They sat, their
[122]
CAIN
solid faces rimmed in whiskers, and smooth fingers
playing with portentous seals, in his office, while
one of their number expounded their presence.
"It's only reasonable, Hulings," he stated
suavely, "that one man can't stand up against
present conditions. Big concerns all along the
coast have gone to wreck. You are an exceptional
man, one we would be glad to have in our Com
pany; and that, briefly, is what we have come to
persuade you to do — to merge your activities here
into the railroad; to get on the locomotive with us.
"Long ago you were shrewd enough to see that
steam transportation was the coming power; and
now — though for the moment we seem overex
tended — your judgment has been approved. It
only remains for you to ratify your perspicacity
and definitely join us. We can, I think, offer you
something in full keeping with your ability — a
vice presidency of the reorganized company and
a substantial personal interest."
Alexander attended the speaker half absently,
though he realized that probably he had arrived
at the crisis of his life, his career; his attention
was rapt away by dreams, memories. He saw
himself again, saturated with sweat and grime,
sitting with Conrad Wishon against the little house
where they slept, and planning his empire of iron;
he thought again, even further back, of the slough
of anguish from which he had won free, and per
sistently, woven through the entire texture, was his
[123]
TUBAL CAIN
vision of iron and of pride. He had sworn to
himself that he would build success from the metal
for which he had such a personal affinity; that he
would be known as the great Ironmaster of
Pennsylvania; and that unsubstantial ideal, totter
ing now on the edge of calamity, was still more
potent, more persuasive, than the concrete and
definite promises of safety, prosperity, the implied
threat, of the established power before him.
He had an objective comprehension of the peril
of his position, his negligible funds and decreasing
credit, the men with accounts clamoring for settle
ment, he thought absurdly of a tessellated floor he
had lately laid .in his vestibule ; the mingled aggres
sion and uncertainty on every hand; but his sub
jective self rose* up and dominated him. Louder
than any warnmg was the cry, the necessity, for
the vindication of the triumphant Alexander Hu-
lings, perpetually rising higher. To surrender his
iron now, to enter, a mere individual, however
elevated, into a corporation, was to confess himself
defeated, to tear down all the radiant images from
which he had derived his reason for being.
Hulings thought momentarily of Gisela; he had,
it might be, no right to involve her blindly in a
downfall of the extent that now confronted him.
However, he relentlessly repressed this considera
tion, together with a vague idea of discussing with
her their — his — position. His was the judgment,
the responsibility, that sustained them; she was
[124]
TUBAL CAIN
only an ornament, the singer of little airs in the
evening; the decoration, in embroidery and gilt
flowers, of his table.
He thanked the speaker adequately and firmly
voiced his refusal of the offer.
"I am an iron man," he stated in partial ex
planation; "as that I must sink or swim."
"Iron," another commented dryly, "is not noted
for its floating properties."
"I am disappointed, Hulings," the first speaker
acknowledged; "yes, and surprised. Of course we
are not ignorant of the condition here; and you
must also know that the company would like to
control your furnaces. We have offered you the
palm, and you must be willing to* meet the con
sequences of your refusal. As ^ said, we'd like
to have you too — energetic and capable; for, as the
Bible reads, 'He that is not for me ' '
When they had gone, driving in a local surrey
back to the canal, Alexander Hulings secured his
hat and, dismissing his carriage, walked slowly
down to Tubal Cain Forge. An increasing roar
and uprush of sooty smoke and sparks marked the
activity within; the water poured dripping under
the water wheel, through the channel he had
cleared, those long years back, with bleeding hands ;
strange men stood at the shed opening; but the
stream and its banks were exactly as he had first
seen them.
His life seemed to have swung in a circle from
[125]
TUBAL1 CAIN
that former day to now — from dilemma to dilemma.
What, after all, did he have, except an increasing
weariness of years, that he had lacked then? He
thought, with a grim smile, that he might find in
his safe nine hundred dollars. All his other pos
sessions suddenly took on an unsubstantial aspect;
they were his; they existed; yet they eluded his
realization, brought him none of the satisfaction of
an object, a fact, solidly grasped.
His name, as he had planned, had grown con
siderable in men's ears, its murmur rose like an
incense to his pride; yet, underneath, it gave him
no satisfaction. It gave him no satisfaction be
cause it carried no conviction of security, no per
sonal corroboration of the mere sound.
What, he now saw, he had struggled to establish
was a good opinion in his own eyes, that actually
he was a strong man; the outer response, upon
which he had been intent, was unimportant com
pared with the other. And in the latter he had not
moved forward a step ; if he had widened his sphere
he had tacitly accepted heavier responsibilities —
undischarged. A flicker hammered on a resonant
limb, just as it had long ago. How vast, eternal,
life was! Conrad Wishon, with his great arched
chest and knotted arms, had gone into obliterat
ing earth.
Death was preferable to ruin, to the concerted
gibes of little men, the forgetfulness of big; once,
looking at his greying countenance in a mirror, he
[126]
TUBAL CAIN
had realized that it would be easier for him to die
than fail. Then, with a sudden twisting of his
thoughts, his mind rested on Gisela, his wife. He
told himself, with justifiable pride, that she had
been content with him; Gisela was not an ordinary
woman, she had not married him for a cheap and
material reason, and whatever admiration she had
had in the beginning he had been able to preserve.
Alexander Hulings was certain of that; he saw it
in a hundred little acts of her daily living. She
thought he was a big man, a successful man ; he had
not permitted a whisper of his difficulties to fret her
serenity, and, by heaven, he thought with a sharp
return of his native vigor, she never should hear
of them; he would stifle them quietly, alone, one by
one.
The idea of death, self-inflicted, a flaccid sur
render, receded before the flood of his returning
pride, confidence. Age, he felt, had not impaired
him; if his importance was now but a shell, he
would fill it with the iron of actuality; he would
place himself and Gisela for ever beyond the
threats of accident and circumstance.
[127]
XIV
GISELA had been to Philadelphia, and she
was unusually gay, communicative; she
was dressed in lavender-and-rose net,
with black velvet, and about her throat she wore a
sparkling pendant that he had never before noticed.
"I hope you'll like it," she said, fingering the
diamonds; "the shape was so graceful that I
couldn't resist. And you are so generous, Alex
ander!"
He was always glad, he told her briefly, to see
her in new and fine adornments. He repressed an
involuntary grimace at the thought of the probable
cost of the ornament. She could hardly have
chosen a worse time in which to buy jewels. Not
only his own situation, but the whole time, was
one for retrenchment. The impulse to tell her
this was speedily lost in his pride of her really
splendid appearance. He himself had commanded
her to purchase whatever she fancied; he had ex
plained that that — the domain of beauty — was ex
clusively hers; and it was impossible to complain
at her first considerable essay.
Here his feeling was rooted in the deepest part
of his being — he was, after all, twenty-five years
older than Gisela; and, as if in a species of repara-
[128]
TUBAL CAIN
tion for the discrepancy, he owed her all the luxury
possible. This he had promised her — and himself;
and an inability to provide gowns and necklaces
and gewgaws was a most humiliating confession
of failure, a failure unendurable to him on every
plane. Alexander, too, had told her finally that
she had no place in his affairs of business; and
after that he could not very well burden her with
the details of a stupid — and momentary — need
for economy.
"I got a sweet bouquet holder," she continued;
"in chased gold, with garnets. And a new prayer
book; you must see that — bound in carved ivory,
from Paris." He listened with a stolid face to
her recital, vaguely wondering how much she had
spent; how long the jeweler would wait for settle
ment. "And there was a wonderful Swiss watch
I thought of for you; it rang the hours and "
"That," he said hastily, "I don't need. I have
two excellent watches."
"But you are always complaining!" she re
turned, mildly surprised. "I didn't get it, but
told the man to put it aside. I'll write if you
don't want it."
"Do!"
Suddenly he felt weary, a twinge of sciatica
shot through his hip ; he must keep out of the damp
cast houses, with their expanses of wet sand. But
actually he was as good as he had ever been;
better, for he now saw clearly what he must ac-
[129]
TUBAL CAIN
complish, satisfy. The present national crisis
would lift; there was already a talk of the resump
tion of gold payment by the state banks; and the
collapse of a firm associated with him in a rolling
mill had thrown its control into his hands. Steam
power had already been connected, and he could
supply the railroad corporation with a certain
number of finished rails direct, adding slightly to
his profit.
The smallest gain was important, a scrap of
wood to keep him temporarily afloat on disturbed
waters; he saw before him, close by, solid land.
But meantime more than one metaphorical wave
swept over his head, leaving him shaken. The
Columbus people returned a shipment of iron,
with the complaint that it was below the grade
useful for their purpose. He inspected the re
jected bars with his head forgeman, and they were
unable to discover the deficiency.
"That's good puddled iron," the forgeman as
serted. "I saw the pig myself, and it could have
been wrought on a cold anvil. Do they expect
blister steel?"
Alexander Hulings kept to himself the knowl
edge that this was the beginning of an assault
upon his integrity, his name and possessions. At
court he could have established the quality of his
iron, forced the railroad to accept it within their
contract. But he had no money to expend on
[130]
TUBAL CAIN
tedious legal processes; and they knew that in the
city.
"We can get a better price for it than theirs,"
he commented.
The difficulty lay in supplying a stated amount.
The forgeman profanely explained something of
his troubles with labor:
"I get my own anvils busy, and perhaps the fur
naces running out the metal, when the damn char
coal burners lay down. That's the hardest crowd
of niggers and drunken Dutch that ever cut wood !
It's never a week but one is shot or has his throat
cut; and some of the coal they send down looks
like pine ash."
At their home he found Gisela with the draper
ies of the dining room in a silken pile on the car
pet.
"I'm tired of this room," she announced; "it's
too — too heavy. Those plum-colored curtains
almost made me weep. Now what do you think?
A white marble mantel in place of that black, and
a mirror with wreaths of colored gilt. An apple
green carpet, with pink satin at the windows,
draped with India muslin, and gold cords, and
Spanish mahogany furniture — that's so much
lighter than this." She studied the interior seri
ously. "Less ormolu and more crystal," Gisela
decided.
He said nothing; he had given her the house
[1311
TUBAL CAIN
— it was her world, to do with as she pleased.
The decorating of the dining room had cost over
three thousand dollars. "And a big Chinese cage,
full of finches and rollers." He got a certain
grim entertainment from the accumulating details
of her planning. Certainly it would be impos
sible to find anywhere a wife more unconscious of
the sordid details of commerce. Gisela was his
ideal of elegance and propriety.
Nevertheless, he felt an odd, illogical loneliness
fastening on him here, where he had thought to
be most completely at ease. His mind, filled with
the practical difficulties of tomorrow, rebelled
against the restriction placed on it; he wanted to
unburden himself of his troubles, to lighten them
with discussion, give them the support of another's
belief in his ability, his destiny; but, with Cryble
gone, and his wife dedicated to purely aesthetic
considerations, there was no one to whom he dared
confess his growing predicament.
Marriage, he even thought, was something of a
failure — burdensome. Gisela, in the exclusive
role of a finch in an elaborate cage, annoyed him
now by her continual chirping song. He thought
disparagingly of all women; light creatures fash
ioned of silks and perfume; extravagant. After
supper he went directly into his office room.
There, conversely, he was irritated with the ac
counts spread perpetually before him, the an
nouncements of fresh failures, depreciated money
[132]
TUBAL CAIN
and bonds. He tramped back and forth across the
limited space, longing to share Gisela's tranquil
lity. In a manner he had been unjust to her; he
had seen, noted, other women — his own was
vastly superior. Particularly she was truthful,
there was no subterfuge, pretense, about her; and
she had courage, but, John Wooddrop's daughter,
she would have. Alexander Hulings thought of
the old man with reluctant admiration; he was
strong; though he, Hulings, was stronger. He
would, he calculated brutally, last longer; and in
the end he would, must, win.
[133]
XV
YET adverse circumstances closed about
him like the stone walls of a cell. The
slightest error or miscalculation would
bring ruin crashing about his pretensions. It was
now principally his commanding interest in the
rolling mill that kept him going; his forges and
furnaces, short of workmen, were steadily losing
ground. And, though summer was at an end,
Gisela chose this time to divert the labor of a con
siderable shift to the setting of new masoned flower
beds. He watched the operation somberly from
the entrance of the conservatory attached, like a
parti-colored fantastic glass bubble, to his house.
"It won't take them over four or five days,"
Gisela said at his shoulder.
He positively struggled to condemn her foolish
waste, but not a word escaped the barrier of his
pride. Once started, he would have to explain the
entire precarious situation to her — the labor
shortage, the dangerous tension of his credit, the
inimical powers anxious to absorb his industry,
the fact that he was a potential failure. He
wished, at any sacrifice, to keep the last from his
wife, convinced as she was of his success.
Surely in a few months the sky would clear and
[134]
TUBAL CAIN
he would triumph — this time solidly, beyond all
assault. He rehearsed this without his usual con
viction; the letters from the Columbus System
were growing more dictatorial; he had received a
covertly insolent communication from an insignifi
cant tool works.
The Columbus Railroad had written that they
were now able to secure a rail, satisfactory for
their purpose and tests, at a considerably lower
figure than he demanded. This puzzled him;
knowing intimately the whole iron situation, he
realized that it was impossible for any firm to
make a legitimate profit at a smaller price than
his. When he learned that the new contracts were
being met by John Wooddrop his face was ugly
— the older man, at a sacrifice, was deliberately,
coldly hastening his downfall. But he abandoned
this unpleasant thought when, later, in a circuitous
manner, he learned that the Wooddrop Rolling
Mills, situated ten miles south of the valleys, were
running on a new, secret, and vastly economical
system.
He looked up, his brow scored, from his desk.
Conrad Wishon's son, a huge bulk, was looking out
through a window, completely blocking off the
light. Alexander Hulings said:
"I'd give a thousand dollars to know something
of that process ! "
The second Wishon turned on his heel.
"What's that?" he demanded.
[135]
TUBAL CAIN
Alexander told him. The other was thoughtful.
"I wouldn't have a chance hereabouts," he pro
nounced; "but I'm not so well known at the South
Mills. Perhaps "
Hulings repeated moodily:
"A thousand dollars!"
He was skeptical of Wishon's ability to learn
anything of the new milling. It had to do ob
scurely with the return of the bars through the
rollers without having to be constantly re-fed.
Such a scheme would cut forty men from the pay
books.
A black depression settled over him, as tan
gible as soot ; he felt physically weary, sick. Alex
ander fingered an accumulation of bills; one, he
saw, was from the Philadelphia jeweler — a fresh
extravagance of Gisela's. But glancing hastily at
its items, he was puzzled — "Resetting diamond
necklace in pendant, fifty-five dollars." It was
addressed to Gisela; its presence here, on his desk,
was an error. After a momentary, fretful con
jecturing he dismissed it from his thoughts;
women were beyond comprehension.
He had now, from the sciatica, a permanent
limp; a cane had ceased to be merely ornamental.
A hundred small details, falling wrongly, rubbed
on the raw of his dejection. The feeling of lone
liness deepened about him. As the sun sank,
throwing up over the world a last dripping bath
of red-gold light, he returned slowly to his house.
[136]
TUBAL CAIN
Each window, facing him, flashed in a broad sheet
of blinding radiance, a callous illumination. A
peacock, another of Gisela's late extravagances,
spread a burnished metallic plumage, with a grat
ing cry.
But the hall was pleasantly still, dim. He stood
for a long minute, resting, drawing deep breaths
of quietude. Every light was lit in the reception
room, where he found his wife, seated, in burnt-
orange satin and bare powdered shoulders, amid
a glitter of glass prisms, gilt and marble. Her
very brilliance, her gay, careless smile, added to
his fatigue. Suddenly he thought — I am an old
man with a young wife! His dejection changed
to bitterness. Gisela said:
"I hope you like my dress; it came from Vienna,
and was wickedly expensive. Really I ought to
wear sapphires with it; I rather think I'll get
them. Diamonds look like glass with orange."
Her words were lost in a confused blurring of
his mind. He swayed slightly. Suddenly the
whole circumstance of his living, of Gisela's bab
bling, became unendurable. His pride, his con
ception of a wife set in luxury above the facts of
existence, a mere symbol of his importance and
wealth, crumbled, stripping him of all pretense.
He raised a thin, /darkly veined and trembling
hand.
"Sapphires!" he cried shrilly. "Why, next
week we'll be lucky if we can buy bread! I am
[137]
TUBAL CAIN
practically smashed — smashed at fifty and more.
This house that you fix up and fix up, that dress
and the diamonds and clocks, and — and
They are not real; in no time they'll go, fade away
like smoke, leave me, us, bare. For five years I
have been fighting for my life; and now I'm los
ing; everything is slipping out of my hands.
While you talk of sapphires; you build bedamned
gardens with the men I need to keep us alive; and
peacocks and "
He stopped as abruptly as he had commenced,
flooded with shame at the fact that he stood before
her self-condemned; that she, Gisela, saw in him
a sham. He miserably avoided her gaze, and was
surprised when she spoke, in an unperturbed warm
voice :
"Sit down, Alexander; you are tired and excited."
She rose and, with a steady hand, forced him into
a chair. "I am glad that, at last, you told me
this," she continued evenly; "for now we can face
it, arrange, together. It can't be so bad as you
suppose. Naturally you are worn, but you are a
very strong man; I have great faith in you."
He gazed at her in growing wonderment; here
was an entirely different woman from the Gisela
who had chattered about Viennese gowns. He
noted, with a renewed sense of security, the firm
ness of her lips, her level, unfaltering gaze. He
had had an unformulated conviction that in crises
women wrung their hands, fainted. She gesticu-
[138]
TUBAL CAIN
lated toward the elaborate furnishings, including
her satin array:
"However it may have seemed, I don't care a
bawbee about these things! I never did; and it
always annoyed father as it annoyed you. I am
sorry, if you like. But at last we understand each
other. We can live, fight, intelligently."
Gisela knew; regret, pretense, were useless now,
and curiously in that knowledge she seemed to
come closer to him; he had a new sense of her
actuality. Yet that evening she not only refused
to listen to any serious statements, but played and
sang the most frothy Italian songs.
[139]
XVI
ON the day following he felt generally up
held. His old sense of power, of dom
ination, his contempt for petty men and
competitions, returned. He determined to go to
Pittsburgh himself and study the labor condi
tions; perhaps secure a fresh, advantageous con
nection. He was planning the details of this when
a man he knew only slightly, by sight, as connected
with the coaling, swung unceremoniously into his
office.
"Mr. Hulings, sir," he stammered, "Wishon has
been shot— killed."
"Impossible!" he ejaculated.
But instantly Alexander Hulings was convinced
that it was true. His momentary confidence,
vigor, receded before the piling adversities, bent
apparently upon his destruction.
"Yes, his body is coming up now. All we
know is, a watchman saw him standing at a win
dow of the Wooddrop Mills after hours, and shot
him for trespassing — spying on their process."
Alexander's first thought was not of the man
just killed, but of old Conrad, longer dead. He
had been a faithful, an invaluable, assistant; with
out him Hulings would never have risen. And
[140]
TUBAL CAIN
now he had been the cause of his son's death! A
sharp regret seized him, but he grew rapidly calm
before the excitement of the inferior before him.
"Keep this quiet for the moment," he com
manded.
"Quiet!" the other cried. "It's already known
all over the mountains. Wishon's workmen have
quit coaling. They swear they will get Wood-
drop's superintendent and hang him."
"Where are they?" Hulings demanded.
The other became sullen, uncommunicative.
"We want to pay them for this," he muttered.
"No better man lived than Wishon."
Alexander at once told his wife of the accident.
She was still surprisingly contained, though pale.
"Our men must be controlled," she asserted. "No
further horrors!"
Her attitude, he thought, was exactly right; it
was neither callous nor hysterical. He was willing
to assume the burden of his responsibilities. It
was an ugly, a regrettable, occurrence; but men
had been killed in his employ before — not a week
passed without an accident, and if he lost his head
in a welter of sentimentality he might as well shut
down at once. Some men lived, struggled up
ward. It was a primary part of the business of
success to keep alive.
Gisela had correctly found the real danger of
their position — the thing must go no further.
The sky had clouded and a cold rain commenced
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to fall. He could, however, pay no attention to the
weather; he rose from a partial dinner and de
parted on a score of complicated and difficult er
rands. But his main concern, to locate and dom
inate the mobbing charcoal burners, evaded his
straining efforts. He caught rumors, echoed
threats; once he almost overtook them; yet, with
scouts placed, they avoided him. •
He sent an urgent message to John Wooddrop,
and, uncertain of its delivery, himself drove in
search of the other; but Wooddrop was out some
where in his wide holdings; the superintendent
could not be located. A sense of an implacable
fatality hung over him; every chance turned
against him, mocked the insecurity of his boasted
position, deepened the abyss waiting for his sus
pended fall.
He returned finally, baffled and weary, to his
house; yet still tense with the spirit of angry com
bat. A species of fatalism now enveloped him in
the conviction that he had reached the zenith of
his misfortunes; if he could survive the present
day. ... A stableman met him at the veranda.
"Mrs. Hulings has gone," the servant told him.
"A man came looking for you. It seems they had
Wooddrop's manager back in the Mills tract and
were going to string him up. But you couldn't be
found. Mrs. Hulings, she went to stop it."
An inky cloud floated nauseously before his eyes
— not himself alone, but Gisela, dragged into the
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TUBAL CAIN
dark whirlpool gathered about his destiny! He
was momentarily stunned, with twitching hands
and a riven, haggard face, remembering the sod
den brutality of the men he had seen in the smoke
of charring, isolated stacks; and then a sharp en
ergy seized him.
"How long back?" Hulings demanded.
"An hour or more, perhaps a couple."
Alexander raged at the mischance that had sent
Gisela on such an errand. Nothing, he felt, with
Wooddrop's manager secured, would halt the char
coal burners' revenge of Wishon's death. The
rain now beat down in a heavy diagonal pour, and
twilight was gathering.
"We must go at once for Mrs. Hulings," he
said. Then he saw Gisela approaching, accom
panied by a 'small knot of men. She walked
directly up to him, her crinoline soggy with rain,
her hair plastered on her brow; but her deathly
pallor drove everything else from his observation.
She shuddered slowly, her skirt dripping cease
lessly about her on the sod.
"I was too late!" she said in a dull voice.
"They had done it! " She covered her eyes, moved
back from the men beside her, from him. "Swing
ing a little ... all alone! So sudden — there,
before me!" A violent shivering seized her.
"Come," Alexander Hulings said hoarsely;
"you must get out of the wet. Warm things. Im
mediately!"
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TUBAL CAIN
He called imperatively for Gisela's maid, and
together they assisted her up to her room. Above,
Gisela had a long, violent chill; and he sent a
wagon for the doctor at Harmony.
The doctor arrived, and mounted the stairs; but,
half an hour later, he would say little. Alexander
Hulings commanded him to remain in the house.
The lines deepened momentarily on the former's
countenance; he saw himself unexpectedly in a
shadowy pier glass, and stood for a long while
subconsciously surveying the lean, grizzled coun
tenance that followed his gaze out of the immate
rial depths. "Alexander Hulings," he said aloud,
in a tormented mockery; "the master of — of life!"
He was busy with the local marshal when the
doctor summoned him from the office.
"Your wife," the other curtly informed him,
"has developed pneumonia."
Hulings steadied himself with a hand against a
wall.
"Pneumonia!" he repeated, to no one in par
ticular. "Send again for John Wooddrop."
He was seated, a narrow, rigid figure, waiting
for the older man, in the midst of gorgeous up
holstery. Two facts hammered with equal per
sistence on his numbed brain: one that all his proj
ects, his dream of power, of iron, now approached
ruin, and the other that Gisela had pneumonia.
It was a dreadful thing that she had come on in the
Mills tract! The Columbus System must tri-
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TUBAL CAIN
umphantly absorb all that he had, that he was to
be. Gisela had been chilled to the bone; pneu
monia ! It became difficult and then impossible to
distinguish one from the other — Gisela and the
iron were inexplicably welded in the poised catas
trophe of his ambition.
Alexander Hulings rose, his thin lips pinched,
his eyes mere sparks, his body tense, as if he were
confronting the embodied force that had checked
him. He stood upright, so still that he might have
been cast in the metal that had formed his vision
of power, holding an unquailing mien. His in
extinguishable pride cloaked him in a final con
tempt for all that life, that fate, might do. Then
his rigidity was assaulted by John Wooddrop's
heavy and hurried entrance into the room.
Hulings briefly repeated the doctor's pronounce
ment. Wooddrop's face was darkly pouched, his
unremoved hat a mere wet film, and he left muddy
exact footprints wherever he stepped on the velvet
carpet.
"By heaven!" he quavered, his arms upraised.
"If between us we have killed her " His
voice abruptly expired.
As Alexander Hulings watched him the old
man's countenance grew livid, his jaw dropped;
he was at the point of falling. He gasped, his
hands beating the air; then the unnatural color
receded, words became distinguishable: "Gisela!
. . . Never be forgiven ! Hellish ! " It was as if
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TUBAL CAIN
Death had touched John Wooddrop on the shoul
der, dragging a scarifying hand across his face,
and then briefly, capriciously, withdrawn.
"Hulings! Hulings," he articulated, sinking
weakly on a chair, "we must save her. And, any
how, God knows we were blind!" He peered out
of suffused rheumy eyes at Alexander, appalling
in his sudden disintegration under shock and the
weight of his years. "I'm done!" he said trem
ulously. "And there's a good bit to see to —
patent lawyer tomorrow, and English shipments.
Swore I'd keep you from it." He held out a hand,
"But there's Gisela, brought down between us now,
and — and iron's colder than a daughter, a wife.
We'd best cover up the past quick as we can!"
At the instant of grasping John Wooddrop's
hand Alexander Hulings' inchoate emotion shifted
to a vast realization, blotting out all else from his
mind. In the control of the immense Wooddrop
resources he was beyond, above, all competition, all
danger. What he had fought for, persistently
dreamed, had at last come about — he was the
greatest Ironmaster of the state!
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