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The Three Black Pennys by Joseph Hergesheimer

J >> Joseph Hergesheimer >> The Three Black Pennys







XXX


The countryside, it appeared to Howat Penny, flamed with autumn and
faded in a day. Throughout the night he heard the crisp sliding of dead
leaves over the roof, the lash of the wind swung impotently about the
rectangular, stone block of his dwelling. At the closing of shutters the
December gales only penetrated to him in a thin, distant complaint. The
burning hickory curtained the middle room with a ruddy warmth. It was a
period of extreme peace; he slept for long hours in a deep chair, or sat
lost in a simulation of sleep, living again in the past. The present was
increasingly immaterial, unimportant; old controversies occupied him,
long since stilled; and among the memories of opera, of Eames as a
splendid girl, forgotten roles, were other, vaguer associations,
impressions which seemed to linger from actual happenings, but
persistently evaded definition. At times, his eyes closed, the glow of
his fireplace burned hotter, more lurid, and was filled with faintly
clamorous sounds; at times there was, woven through his half-wakeful
dreaming, a monotonous beat ... such as the fall of a hammer. He saw,
too, strange and yet familiar faces--a girl in silk like an extravagant
tea rose; a countenance seamed and glistening with pain floated in
shadow; and then another mocked and mocked him. Once he heard the
drumming of rain, close above; and the illusion was so strong that he
made his way to the door; a black void was glistening with cold and
relentless stars.... Now he was standing by a dark, hurrying river,
nothing else was visible; and yet he was thrilled by a sense of utter
rapture.

He developed a feeling of the impermanence of life, his hold upon it no
stronger than the tenuous cord of a balloon straining impatiently in
great, unknown currents. The future lost all significance, reality;
there were only memories; the vista behind was long and clear, but the
door to to-morrow was shut. Looking into his mirror the reflection was
far removed; it was hollow-cheeked and silvered, unfamiliar. He half
expected to see a different face, not less lean, but more arrogant, with
a sharply defined chin. The actual, blurred visage accorded ill with his
trains of thought; it was out of place among the troops of gala youth.

A wired letter, a customary present of cigarettes, came from Mariana on
Christmas, gifts from Charlotte and Bundy Provost. There was champagne
at his place for dinner; and he sealed crisp money in envelopes
inscribed Rudolph, Honduras, and the names of the cook and maid. He
drank the wine solemnly; the visions were gone; and he saw himself as an
old man lingering out of his time, alone. There was, however, little
sentimental melancholy in the realization; he held an upright pride, the
inextinguishable accent of a black Penny. His disdain for the
commonality of life still dictated his prejudices. He informed Rudolph
again that the present opera was without song; and again Rudolph gravely
echoed the faith that melody was the heart of music.

The winds grew even higher, shriller; the falls of snow vanished before
drenching, brown rains, and the afternoons perceptibly lengthened. There
was arbutus on the slopes, robins, before he recognized that April was
accomplished. A farmer ploughed the vegetable garden behind the house;
and Honduras dragged the cedar bean poles from their resting place.
Mariana soon appeared.

"I wouldn't miss the spring at Shadrach for a hundred years of
hibiscus," she told him. He gathered that she had been south. She
brought him great pleasure, beat him with annoying frequency at sniff,
and was more companionable than ever before. She had, he thought, forgot
James Polder; and he was careful to avoid the least reference to the
latter. Mariana was a sensible girl; birth once more had told.

She was better looking than he had remembered her, more tranquil; a
distinguished woman. It was incredible that a man approximately her
equal had not appeared. Then, without warning--they were seated on the
porch gazing through the tender green foliage of the willow at the
vivid young wheat beyond--she said:

"Howat, I am certain that things are going badly with Jimmy. He wrote to
me willingly in the winter, but twice since then he hasn't answered a
letter."

He suppressed a sharp, recurrent concern. "It's that Harriet," he told
her, capitally diffident. "You are stupid to keep it up. What chance
would he have had answering her letters married to you?"

"This is different," she replied confidently. He saw that he had been
wrong--nothing had changed, lessened. Howat swore silently. That
damnable episode might well spoil her entire existence. But he wisely
avoided argument, comment. A warm current of air, fragrant with apple
blossoms, caught the ribbon-like smoke of his cigarette and dissipated
it. She smiled with half-closed eyes at the new flowering of earth. Her
expression grew serious, firm. "I think we'd better go out to
Harrisburg," she remarked, elaborately casual, "and see Jimmy for
ourselves."

He protested vehemently, but--from experience in that quarter--with a
conviction of futility. "She'll laugh at you," he told Mariana. "Haven't
you any proper pride?" She shook her head.

"Not a scrap. It's just that quality in Jim that annoyed me, and spoiled
everything. I'd cook for them if it would do any good." Irritation
mastered him. "This is shameful, Mariana," he declared. "Don't your
position, your antecedents, stand for anything? If I had Jasper Penny
here I would tell him what I thought of his confounded behaviour!" He
rose, and walked the length of the porch and back.

"The first part of next week?" she queried. "I won't go a mile," he
stated, in sheer bravado. "Then," said Mariana, "I must do it alone." He
muttered a period in which the term hussy was solely audible. "Which of
us?" she asked, calmly. "Actually," he exploded, "I feel sorry for that
Harriet. I sympathize with her. She got the precious James fair enough,
and the decent thing for you is to keep away."

"But I'm not decent either," Mariana continued. "If you could know what
is in my head you'd recognize that. I seem to have no good qualities. I
don't want them, Howat," her voice intensified; "I want Jim."

He was completely silenced by this desire persisting in spite of every
established obstacle. It summoned an increasing response at the core of
his being. Such an attitude was, more remotely, his own; but in him it
had been purely negative, an inhibition rather than a challenge; he had
kept out of life instead of actively defying it. In him the family
inheritance of blackness was subsiding with the rest.

Howat maintained until the moment of their departure his protest, his
perverse community with Harriet Polder. "You'll find a happy house," he
predicted, "and come home like a fool. I hope you do. It ought to help
make you more reasonable. She will tell James to give you a comfortable
chair, and apologize for not asking you to dinner." She gazed through
the car window without replying. He realized that he had never seen
Mariana more becomingly dressed--she wore a rough, silver-coloured suit
with a short jacket, a pale green straw hat, like the new willow leaves,
across the blueness of her eyes, and an innumerably ruffled and flounced
waist of thinnest batiste. A square, deep emerald hung from a platinum
chain about her neck; and a hand, stripped of its thick white glove,
showed an oppressive, prismatic glitter of diamonds.

The morning was filled with dense, low, grey cloud, under which the
river on their left flowed without a glimmer of brightness. Howat was
aware of an increasing sulphurous pall, and suddenly the train was
passing an apparently endless confusion of great, corrugated iron sheds,
rows of towering, smoking stacks, enormous, black cylinders, systems of
tracks over which shrilling locomotives hauled carloads of broken slag,
or bumped strings of trucks, with reckless energy, in and out of the
grimy interiors. The overpowering magnitude of the steel works--Howat
Penny needed no assurance of its purpose--exceeded every preconception.

Shut between the river and an abrupt hillside, where scattered dwellings
and sparse trees and ground were coated with a soft monotony of
rose-brown dust, the mills were jumbled in mile-long perspectives.
Above the immediate noise of the train he could hear the sullen, blended
roar of an infinity of strident sounds--the screaming of whistles, a
choked, drumming thunder, rushing blasts of air, the shattering impact
of steel rails, raw steam, and a multitudinous clangour of metal and
jolting wheels and connective power. He passed rusting mountains
straddled by giant gantries, the towering lifts of mammoth cranes, banks
of chalk-white stone, dizzy super-structures mounted by spasmodic skips.

As the train proceeded with scarcely abated speed, and the vast
operation continued without a break, mill on mill, file after file of
stacks, Howat Penny's senses were crushed by the spectacle of such
incredible labour. Suddenly a column of fire, deep orange at the core,
raying through paler yellow to a palpitating white brilliancy, shot up
through the torn vapours, the massed and shuddering smoke, to the
clouds, and was sharply withdrawn in a coppery smother pierced by a
rapid, lance-like thrust of steel-blue flame.

These stupendous miles were, to-day, the furnaces and forges that
Gilbert Penny had built and operated in the pastoral clearings of the
Province. Howat recalled the single, diminutive shed of Myrtle Forge,
the slender stream, the wheel, its sole power; the solitary stack of
Shadrach Furnace, recreated in his vision, opposed its insignificant
bulk against the living greenery of overwhelming forests. Now the
forests were gone, obliterated by the mills that had grown out of
Gilbert's energy and determination, his pioneer courage. His spirit, the
indomitable will of a handful of men, a small, isolated colony, had
swept forward in a resistless tide, multiplying invention, improvement,
with success until, as Howat had seen, their flares reached to the
clouds, their industry spread in iron cities. James Polder had a part in
this. Here, under the ringing walls of the steel mills, he got a fresh
comprehension of the bitter, restless virility of the younger man.

Out of the station Mariana furnished the driver of a public motor with
James Polder's address, and they twisted through congested streets, past
the domed Capitol, rising from intense green sod, flanked by involved
groups of sculpture, to a quieter reach lying parallel with the river.
They discovered Polder's house occupying a corner, one of a short row of
yellow brick with a scrap of lawn bound by a low wall, and a porch
continuous across the face of the dwellings.

The door opened after a long interval, and a woman with bare arms and a
spotted kitchen apron admitted them to an interior faintly permeated
with the odours of cooking. There were redly varnished chairs, upright
piano, a heavily framed saccharine print of loves and a flushed,
sleeping divinity; a table scarred by burning cigarettes, holding cerise
knitting on needles one of which was broken, glasses with dregs of beer,
a photograph in a tarnished silver frame of Harriet de Barry Polder
with undraped shoulders and an exploited dimple, and a copy of a
technical journal. A fretful, shrill barking rose at their heels; and
Howat Penny swung his stick at a diminutive, silky white dog with
matted, pinkish eyes, obsessed by an impotent fury.

An indolent voice drifted from above. "Cherette!" And a low, masculine
protest was audible. Mariana Jannan's face was inscrutable. The woman
continued audibly, "How can I--like this? You will have to see what it
is." A moment later James Polder, drawing on a coat, descended the
stairs. He saw Mariana at once, and stood arrested with one foot on the
floor, and a hand clutching the rail. A sudden pallor invaded his
countenance and Howat turned away, inspecting the print. But he could
not close his hearing to the suppressed eagerness, the stammering joy,
of Polder's surprise.

"And you, too," he said to the elder, with a crushing grip. Howat
immediately recognized that the other was marked by an obvious ill
health; his eyes were hung with shadows, like smudges of the iron dust,
and his palm was hot and wet. "Harriet," he called up the stair, "here's
Miss Jannan and Mr. Howat Penny to see us." A complete silence above,
then a sharp rustle, replied to his announcement. "Harriet will be right
down," he continued; "fixing herself up a little first. Have trouble
finding us? Second Street is high for a foreman, but we're moving out
against the future."

The dog maintained a stridulous barking; and James Polder carried her,
in an ecstasy of snarling ill-temper, out. "Cherette doesn't appreciate
callers," he stated, with an expression that contradicted the mildness
of his words. His gaze, Howat thought, rested on Mariana with the
intensity of a fanatic Arab at the apparition of Mohammed. And Mariana
smiled back with a penetrating comprehension and sympathy. The
proceeding made Howat Penny extremely uncomfortable; it was--was
barefaced. He hoped desperately that something more appropriately casual
would meet the appearance of Harriet. Mariana said:

"You haven't been well." Polder replied that it was nothing. "I get a
night shift," he explained, "and I've never learned to sleep through the
day. We're working under unusual pressure, too; inhuman contracts,
success." He smiled without gaiety. "You didn't answer my letter," the
outrageous Mariana proceeded. Howat withered mentally at her cool
daring, and Polder, now flushed, avoided her gaze. The necessity of
answer was bridged by the descent of his wife. Her face, as always,
brightly coloured, was framed in an instinctively effective twist of
gold hair; and she wore an elaborately braided, white cloth skirt, a
magenta georgette crepe waist, with a deep, boyish collar, drawn tightly
across her full, soft body.

"Isn't it fierce," she demanded cheerfully, "with Jim out as many nights
as he's in bed?" She produced a pasteboard package of popular
cigarettes and offered them to Howat Penny and Mariana. "Sorry, I can't
smoke any others," she explained, striking a match. "I heard you saying
he doesn't look right," she addressed Mariana. "And it's certainly the
truth. Who would with what he does? I tell him our life is all broke up.
One night stands used to get me, but they're a metropolitan run compared
with this. Honest to God," she told them good naturedly, "I've
threatened to leave him already. I'd rather see him a property man with
me on the road."

"It must be a little wearing," Mariana agreed; "but then, you know, your
husband is a steel man. This is his life." Howat Penny could see the
cordiality ebbing from the other woman's countenance. Positively,
Mariana ought to be ... "I can get that," Harriet Polder informed her.
"We are only hanging on till Jim's made superintendent. Then we'll be
regular inhabitants. Any other small thing?" At the sharpening note of
her voice James Polder hurriedly proceeded with general facts. "You'll
want to see the Works, as much as I can show you. Hardly any of the
public are let through now. It will interest you, sir, to see what the
Penny iron trade has become. I can take you down this afternoon. Harriet
will find us some lunch." The latter moved in a sensuous deliberation,
followed by a thin, acidulous trail of smoke, into inner rooms. "When do
you have to go back?" Polder asked.

"This evening," Howat told him; "we just stopped to--"

"To see how you were," Mariana interrupted him baldly, studying the
younger man with a concerned frown. "You ought to rest, you know," she
decided. "That's possible," he returned. "I thought of asking for a
couple of weeks. I hurried back right after I was married. They are
coming to me." She enigmatically regarded Howat Penny; he saw that she
was about to speak impetuously; but, to his great relief, she stopped.
"It's been pretty hard on Harriet," he said instead. "After the stage
and audiences, and all that." Mariana's expression was cold. Confound
her, why didn't she help the fellow! Howat Penny fidgeted with his
stick. What a stew Polder had gotten himself into. This was worse, even,
than the marriage threatened.

Lunch was a spasmodic affair of cutlets hardening in grease, blue boiled
potatoes, sandy spinach and blanched ragged bread. There was more beer;
but Jim, his wife proceeded, liked whiskey and water with his meals. The
former glanced uneasily at Mariana, tranquilly cutting up her cutlet.
The diamonds on her narrow, delicate hand flashed, the emerald at her
throat was superb. Their surroundings were doubly depressing contrasted
with her fastidious dress and person. Before her composure Harriet
Polder seemed over-florid; a woman of trite phrases, commonplace,
theatrical attitudes and emotions. As lunch progressed the latter
relapsed into a sulky silence; she glanced surreptitiously at Mariana's
apparel; and consumed cigarettes with a straining assumption of easy
indifference.

Howat Penny was acutely uncomfortable, and Polder scowled at his plate.
The whiskey and water shook in a tense, unsteady hand. He rose from the
table with a violent relief. He proposed almost immediately that they go
over to the Works, and Mariana turned pleasantly to his wife. "Shall you
get a hat?" The other hesitated, then asserted defiantly, "I've always
said I wouldn't go into that rackety place, and I won't now. It's bad
enough to have it tramped back over things." Mariana extended a hand.
"Then good-bye," she proceeded. "I think we won't get back here. We're
tremendously obliged for the lunch. It has been interesting to see where
Jim lives." Harriet Polder's cheeks were darker than pink as they moved
out to the sidewalk. "Jim," she called, with an unmistakably proprietary
sounding of the familiar diminution; "don't forget my cigarettes, and a
half pound of liver for Cherette."




XXXI


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A stunning white flare filled the far roof with a dazzling illumination;
and, in a dull explosion, a terrific billowing of heat, a cataract of
liquid steel burst out through lambent orange and blue flames. It
poured, searing the vision, into the ladle, over which rosy clouds
accumulated in a bank drifting through the great space of the shed.
Nothing, Howat thought, could contain, control, the appalling expansion,
the furious volume, of seething white metal. He was obliged to turn
away, blinded by sheets of complementary green hanging before his eyes.

The uproar subsided, the flooding steel became bluer, a solid stream
curving into the black depths of the ladle. Vapours of green and sulphur
and lilac shivered into the denser ruby smoke and rising silver spray.
Polder called a warning into Mariana's ear, they drew back as a lump of
coal was heaved up from the pit, into the ladle. A dull vermilion blaze
followed, and Howat Penny partly heard an explanation--"recarburizing."
He could now see the steel bubbling up to the rim of the container. Men,
Polder said shortly, had fallen in.... Utterly unthinkable. With a
sudorific heat that drove them still farther back the slag boiling on
the steel flowed in a gold cascade over a great lip into a second
receptacle below. That was soon filled, and gorgeous streams and pools
widened across the riven ground. The steel itself escaped in a milky
incandescence. "A wild heat," James Polder told them, pleased. "The
bottom of a furnace may drop out. I was almost caught in the pit at
Cambria." The crane chains swung forward, picked up the ladle of molten
metal, and shifted it through the air to a position over a circular
group of moulds. There, a valve opened, the steel poured into a central
pipe. "Bottom-filled," Polder concluded, assisting Mariana over the
precarious flooring; "the metal rises into the ingot forms."

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

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