Chapter 14

A question moved in Elsie's eyes but she did not speak. Clark, taking in the supple grace of her figure and expanding to the candor of her spirit, wondered if now, at the apex of his labors, the color of his future life was being evolved by this girl who was as free and untainted as the winds of Superior. He had at times attempted friendships of another kind and found them unsatisfying and pondered whether this might not be the human solution of that loneliness which he had admitted to her, months before, was only so far assuaged by driving himself to the uttermost. Then her voice came in again.

"It was so queer meeting you here, just as if the voice of the rapids had carried a hundred miles. I always associate you with the rapids."

"But they'll go on forever, and I won't."

"You're doing something better than that," she said swiftly.

He laid down his paddle. "I'd like very much to know just what my new friend means."

"You're touching the hidden springs of things that will go on forever." Elsie's voice was vibrant with feeling. "That's the difference between you and other men I know. You're in the secret."

Clark drew a long breath. "When did you decide that, and why?"

"When I heard about your speech that first night. I was only seventeen then but I felt almost as if you'd told me the secret. So I've followed all you've accomplished since, and I would give anything to have done just the littlest part of it."

"So it's just a matter of recognizing one's destiny and following it?" he said curiously.

"Just that." Complete conviction was in her tones.

"Then, for the first time in my life, I'm wondering what destiny has in store for the immediate future," he said with a long stare of his gray eyes, and in them was that which set her heart throbbing.

"You must go to-morrow?" she ventured. Could such wonderful moments ever be repeated?

"Yes, at sunrise, and I'll be at the works at noon. Do you know that you've done a lot for me? It's a selfish remark, but it's true, and may we have another talk when you get back?"

Her lips trembled, and Clark, gazing at her, felt an intense yearning. She was very beautiful and very understanding. Then again he hesitated. There were things, many things, he had in mind to arrange before he spoke. A few weeks would make no difference, but only prolong those delightful and undecipherable sensations to which he now yielded luxuriously. If this was love, he had never known love before.

The sun's red orb was thrusting up over the glassy lake when, next morning, the big tug with a slow thudding of her propeller, moved from her anchorage. At Clark's orders they passed on down the channel, and just where the lake began to broaden was a cluster of white tents. Two Indians were warming their fingers at a rekindled fire. Clark stared hard, and lifted his hat.

One of the tent flaps had been opened, and a girl stood against a snowy background, her hair hanging loose. As the tug drew abreast she waved good-by, and, for another mile, till he swung round the next point, he could see the slim figure and its farewell salutation. There was something mystical about it all. The girl vanished abruptly behind a screen of trees, the propeller revolved more rapidly, and the sharp swish of cleft water deepened at the high, straight bow.

He stood for a long time immersed in profound thought, and oblivious of the keen air of early morning. Never before had he found it hard to go back to duty.

Six hours later the tug swept into the St. Marys River, and three miles ahead lay the works, the vast square-topped buildings rising, it seemed, out of the placid waters of the bay. He drew a long breath and emerged from fairyland. Had he created all this? Yet it was not more real than something he had just left and had also created.

XVIII.--MATTERS FINANCIAL

The young manager of the local bank through which Clark transacted his affairs sat late one night in his office. He had just returned from dinner at the big house, where he left his host in an unusually genial and communicative mood. It seemed that Clark's mind, tightened with the continued strain of years, had wished to slacken itself in an hour or two of utter candor, and Brewster had listened with full consciousness that this was an occasion which might never be repeated. But in his small cubicle, walled in with opaque glass, Clark's magnetic accents appeared to dwindle before the inexorable character of the statement Brewster now scrutinized. It was the detailed and financial history of each successive company, a history in which birth and bones and articulation were clearly set forth, and what struck the young man most forcibly was the extraordinary way in which each was interlinked with the rest. The combined capital of all was, he noted, twenty-seven million dollars, and greater than that yet reached by the Canadian Pacific Railway. Brewster had known it before, but the bald and cumulative figures in front of him made the fact the more momentous.

Probing still deeper, it became apparent that while the pulp mills made steady profits, these were so adjusted as to form but one link in a chain. In all there were some ten companies, each drawing from the others its business and its surplus. Clark had not been far wrong when he reflected that he might be asking one dollar to do too much, and now the sharp brain of the young manager was coming to the same conclusion. Behind his office building passed Clark's steamships, for there was a transportation company, and into the wilderness Clark's trains plunged with unfailing regularity. Up at the works the blast furnaces were vomiting flame and smoke, and the rail mill was nearly completed. Baudette was sending down train loads and rafts of wood, and at the iron mine dynamite was lifting thousands of tons of ore. The entire aggregation of effort and expenditure had been so systematically interwoven that Brewster there and then decided that if one link in the chain should part, the whole fabric of the thing would dissolve. It was true that he made no advances without authority from his headquarters, but he had long been aware that Clark's was the largest commercial account in Canada and, he reflected gravely, it all went through his own office. Two days later he reached Toronto, and asked audience of his general manager.

Now since this record is partly that of the relative standing of different individuals in the development of a little known district, consider Brewster in consultation with Thorpe, the general manager of his great bank. Brewster was young, active, in close touch with Clark and his enterprises, enthusiastic, yet touched with a certain power of quick and ruthless decision. He had been interested and even thrilled by the doings at St. Marys, but he had never yielded himself completely to Clark's mesmeric influence. Thorpe, a much older man and of noted executive ability, was one of those who by that noted address at the Board of Trade had been rooted out of long standing indifference and imbued with surprised confidence, and this translation, so rapid in its movements, still survived. In consequence, he listened to the younger man with a thinly veiled incredulity.

"I can't quite see it," he said thoughtfully, "even from your own account. It's probably the proportions of the thing that makes you anxious."

Brewster shook his head. "No, it isn't that. There's a big power house on the American side and it didn't earn a cent for a year, something wrong with the foundations, though it's all right now. There's the sulphur extraction plant that doesn't extract sulphur, and--"

"What?" interrupted Thorpe. He, like others, had read of the new process with keen interest, and was anxious to learn details.

"It worked in the laboratory but not on a commercial basis. Belding, the chief engineer, is all cut up about it. Consequence is Clark is buying sulphur, and just now pulp prices are so low he's not making anything out of it."

"Have you seen Wimperley lately?"

"He was up with Birch a week or so ago."

"Say anything particular?"

Brewster smiled reflectively. "He didn't seem to want to talk."

"What are the obligations?" asked Thorpe after a little pause.

"Of all companies?"

"Of course."

"About two millions as nearly as I can get at them."

"And to us?"

Brewster handed over a slip of paper. "This is a copy of what I forwarded yesterday."

The older man's brows cleared a little. The combined overdraft was just over a hundred thousand, against which the bank held Philadelphia acceptances which he knew would be met. He glanced over the statement again.

"You've looked after this extremely well. Now what do you want me to do?"

Brewster drew a long breath. "I don't want you to take my word for anything, but come up and see for yourself. Go into the woods and up to the mines and through the entire works--then come to your own conclusions. It may be I'm too near the thing to get the right perspective, but I give it to you as I see it."

Thorpe nodded. "I know you have and your branch has done extremely well."

"Thanks." Brewster laughed. "That's due to the man we're talking about."

"And supposing," put in Thorpe thoughtfully, "supposing the whole thing were to go smash! What would you say?"

The other man's eyes rounded a little. "I'd say," he answered slowly, "that even in that case the entire district would be in Clark's debt."

"Yes?"

"Because they know what's in the country now and how to get it out--and they never knew that before."

"And the immediate future--what do you see that depends on?"

"Steel rails," said Brewster with conviction. "Will you come up?"

Thorpe did go up, and Clark, who knew that Brewster had been in Toronto and conceived why, met them both at the works with a genuine welcome. He felt, nevertheless, that his undertakings were to be analyzed with cold deliberation.

At the end of two days Thorpe had seen them all--had peered into the gray black bowels of the iron mine, watched Baudette denuding the slopes of a multitude of hills--seen the stamps in the gold mill hammering out the precious particles that were caught by great quicksilver plates,--seen booms and train loads of pulp on their way to St. Marys--seen the white spruce shaven of its brown bark and ground and sheeted and loaded into the gaping holds of Clark's steamships--seen the blast furnaces vomit their molten metal--seen the rhythmic pumps and dynamos send water and light through every artery of the young city--seen the veneer mills ripping out flexible miles of their satiny wood--seen the power house on the American side making carbide to the low rumble of thousands of horsepower, and seen the electric railway that linked Ironville with St. Marys. And all the time Clark had put forward neither arguments in his own favor nor any request for credit, but only allowed these things to speak for themselves, till, as the aggregate became more and more rounded and the picture more complete, Thorpe perceived that here was something which initiated by an extraordinary brain had now grown to such vast proportions that it supplied its own momentum, and must of necessity move on to its appointed and final result.

But Clark did not distinguish in either Thorpe or Brewster any determining factor of his future. They would do what they were meant to do, and play the game as the master of the game decided. They might modify, but they would never create. His mind was pitched so far ahead that it was beside the mark to attempt to influence men who, he conceived, were not themselves endowed with any prophetic vision. He had to deal with them and he dealt with them, and though he wondered mutely at their abiding sense of the present and their apparent lack of faith in the inevitable future, he descended from the heights of his own imagination and parleyed in the bald and merciless language of strictly commercial affairs.

It was at the end of his visit that Thorpe asked about the sulphur plant.

Clark glanced at him curiously. The sulphur plant was so small a fraction of the whole.

"There's a certain step in the process we have not perfected--that's all. You don't believe in economic waste, do you?"

"No, certainly not--if avoidable."

"Well, I'm satisfied that this is avoidable. It is just as much a mistake to allow water to run away when it might be grinding pulp, as it is to drive sulphur into the air instead of catching and selling it. You pollute the air, you kill the trees, you spend a lot of money, and you waste the sulphur. Nature has a lot of processes up her sleeve we've not realized as yet. This is one of them."

"Then this plant is a mistake?" Thorpe got it out with some hesitation.

Clark laughed. "Some of it--so far. I make plenty of mistakes, don't you? It seems to me it's the proportion his mistakes bear to the things that succeed which determines a man's usefulness. I don't believe in the one who doesn't make them."

Thorpe grinned in spite of himself. "Perhaps you're right--but I'll be glad to know as soon as you're rolling rails. When do you expect that?"

"In six months at the latest. I'll send you a section of the first one."

The banker drove toward the station in unaccustomed silence. Presently he turned to Brewster. "You were right and, by George! Clark is right too, but we must not get our mutual rectitude mixed up. He's got to go ahead, come what may, and we've got to help him all we reasonably can, but with us our shareholders come before his. That's the point. He may turn out to be a private liability, but in any case he's a national asset. I want a bit of that first rail. Good-by!"

And Clark, after waving farewell at the big gates of the works, had gone into the rail mill and stood in the shadow in deep contemplation. He glanced at the massive flywheel, the great dominant dynamo and the huge, inflexible rolls. At one end were the heating furnaces, their doors open, and gentle fires glowing softly within to slowly raise the temperature of newly set brick. Around him was the swing of work directed by skilled brains, and machinery moved slowly into its appointed place of service. It was a good mill, he reflected, for a second hand mill. For all of this the place was dead--awaiting the pulse of power and the unremitting supply of incandescent metal. Glancing keenly about, he experienced again that strange sound as though between his temples, and suddenly he felt tired. The thing was good, very good. But he too wanted to see the lambent metal spewed from between the shining rolls.

It was a notable day in St. Marys when the first rail was actually rolled, and symbolical to many people of many different things. Infection spread from the words to the town, till all morning there was a trickling stream of humanity that filed in at the big gates and moved on toward the dull roar of the mill. Even though the mass of folk in St. Marys still failed to grasp the full significance of the event, they saw in it that which put their one time Arcadia beside Pittsburg, and invested their own persons with a new sense of importance.

Clark, watching the fruition of a seven year dream, felt thrilled as never before. Here, in this heat and mechanical tumult, was being forged the last link in the chain into which he had hammered his entire strength and spirit. It was a good thing, he reflected, to make pulp and ship it on his own steamships, but this was the biggest, deepest and most enduring thing of all. Some men at such a moment would have felt humble, but he recognized only the unfolding of an elemental drama in which he played his own particular role. A few weeks later he closed a contract with a great railway company for a million dollars' worth of his new product, which he unhesitatingly guaranteed would live up to the most exacting specifications.

The new plant had settled down to the steady drive of work when the mayor of St. Marys, walking up the street in a mood of peculiar satisfaction, saw just ahead of him the bulky form of the chief constable. He stepped a little faster and laid a detaining hand on the broad shoulder.

"Arrest yourself for a minute," he chuckled. "How's our town pessimist feeling this fine morning?"

Manson glanced sideways. "I suppose you want to rub it in. Well, I don't know that my opinions have changed very much."

"Takes more than a few thousand tons of rails to move you, eh? But isn't Mahomet going to come to the mountain at last?"

Manson shook his head.

"If he doesn't the mountain will come to Mahomet--and crush him," continued Filmer gayly, then, his mood changing, "but honestly, old man, why don't you drop your gloomy views? You've an excellent chance right now, and, besides, they're getting rather amusing."

"I've a right to my own opinions."

"Naturally, we all have, but you don't act up to them--at least you didn't."

Manson glowered at him with quick suspicion. "What's that?"

"Your left hand knows what your right hand doeth--every time,--at least it's so in St. Marys. You're too big to get under a bushel basket. Every one saw that you were dabbling in real estate for years, and made a good clean up, but you seemed so darned ashamed of it that no one cared to discuss it with you. And all the time you were our prize package disbeliever. What's the use? It's your own affair, but why don't you make a lightning change like the man in the circus last week? Your friends would welcome it. You're not the man we used to know."

"If it's my own affair," came back Manson with growing resentment, "why not leave it at that? Did you never make any money out of a thing you didn't believe in?"

"Yes," said Filmer slowly, "I have, but after that I believed in it, and said so. It was only fair to the fellow behind it."

Manson went stolidly back to his square stone office, where he took out his broker's statement for the previous month and stared at it silently. Already he knew the figures by heart. Another two point rise in Consolidated stock and he would realize his net profit of one hundred thousand dollars. He ran over his own scribbled figures on the back of the statement, as he had gone over them many times before. They were quite right. For weeks past his selling order had been in, been acknowledged, and now at any moment the thing might be done. It might even have already been done. The blood rushed to his head at the thought. How many other chief constables, he wondered, had amassed fortunes from behind their forbidding gray stone walls? Then he thought of his wife and children, and his eyes softened, while the broker's statement in his big hand trembled ever so slightly. He smiled at that, and it came to his mind that perhaps statements in other men's hands sometimes trembled at the thought of their wives and children and the fortunes that--and here Manson felt vaguely uncomfortable and, getting up, slowly locked his desk.

Just at that moment, Filmer, who had returned to his office, was sitting staring at a half-section of steel rail that lay in his hand. It was smooth and highly polished, a thin slice of the very first product of Clark's last and greatest undertaking. He experienced a quite extraordinary sensation at feeling the thing, and it snatched his mind back seven years till again in the Town Hall he heard a magnetic voice assuring the citizens that the town lacked just three essentials--experience, money and imagination, and that the speaker would supply them all. It was a far cry from that evening to the deep drone of the rail mill, and Filmer, detaching himself from the picture in which he formed a part, began now to perceive its dramatic vitality. Were Clark taken out the whole thing seemed to fall to pieces.

And up at the See House, the bishop was examining just such another section of rail, while the gold of his episcopal ring shone beside the gray of steel. To him it meant many things, but chiefly it was prophetic of that which would soon put an end to the detachment and loneliness of the scattered communities to which he ministered. Holding the thing thus, his heart went out to Clark, and he yearned with a great longing over the spirit of this man who so reveled in the joy of creation. His eyes wandered to the Evangeline. She lay at anchor just off shore. A thin film of smoke slid from her funnel, and he could see the Indian pilot swabbing down her smooth teak decks. Then, in sudden impulse, he smiled and, laying the rail section on top of a half finished sermon, wrote a short note, and, calling his man servant, instructed him to wait for an answer.

A little later the note reached Clark in his office, where he sat motionless under the sway of a slight reaction. At the moment he did not want to work. He was continuously conscious of ribbons of red hot rails that streamed like fluted snakes from under the gigantic rolls, and they seemed to be boring their way into his brain. He had shipped thousands of tons to the railway company and there were thousands more to go. In a week or so he would get a formal acceptance of his product, and then-- He stretched himself a little wearily and pressed his eyes till a red and compelling blur brought its transient solace. And just then his secretary came in with the bishop's note.

Dear Mr. Clark:

I am off this afternoon for a five day cruise of visits amongst the islands of Lake Huron. Won't you come with me? I know it would be good for me and think it might give you what I'm sure is a much needed rest. My Mercury, I mean the hired man, awaits your answer.

Yours faithfully, JAMES, ALGOMA.

P. S. I never attempt to proselytize my guests.

For a moment he puzzled over the signature, and finally made out that it was the bishop's Christian name followed by that of his diocese, for this was the first letter he had received from the prelate. Then he felt a sudden throb of impulse. He had a natural liking for the bishop and this, with his insatiable appetite for new experiences, prompted an acceptance. He touched the bell, and his secretary reappeared.

"I am going away for five days," he paused, adding with a smile--"on missionary work. I haven't any idea where we are going and don't want to be disturbed. I'll be back before we receive the results of the United Railway Company's tests. That's all."

It was mid-afternoon when the Evangeline, gliding smoothly over the polished surface of the bay, drew in towards the Consolidated dock, and Clark, watching from the shadow of a mountain of bales of pulp assembled for shipment, saw the Indian pilot amidship at the wheel and the bishop, in a big, coarse, straw hat, standing in the slim bow, a coil of rope in his hands and a broad smile on his big sunburnt face.

"Catch!" The bight of the rope whistled through the air and struck smartly at his guest's feet.

The latter laughed, picked it up and made fast. It struck him suddenly that it was curious the bishop should be throwing him a rope. Then he reflected that it was the bishop and not himself who needed help.

The former was very gay, his kindly face alight with amusement and anticipation. Presently came a throb from the engine room, and the Evangeline sheered off down the river, past the new St. Marys where staring red brick buildings shouldered up out of the old time houses, past the See Mouse, while a flag fluttered jerkily down from the tall mast at whose top it flew when the bishop was at home, past the American side, where Clark's big power house stretched its gray length at the edge of the river, and on till they came to the long point that closes the upper reach, and just then both men turned and looked up stream at the vanishing bulk of the huge structures beside the rapids, and the flat line of tremulous foam that marked the rapids themselves. The voice of them was, at this distance, mute.