________________________________________________
_ On Tuesday afternoon a Boston lawyer,
who had been trying a case in Vermont,
was standing on the siding at White River Junction
when the Canadian Express pulled by on its
northward journey. As the day-coaches at
the rear end of the long train swept by him,
the lawyer noticed at one of the windows a
man's head, with thick rumpled hair.
"Curious," he thought; "that looked like
Alexander, but what would he be doing back
there in the daycoaches?"
It was, indeed, Alexander.
That morning a telegram from Moorlock
had reached him, telling him that there was
serious trouble with the bridge and that he
was needed there at once, so he had caught
the first train out of New York. He had taken
a seat in a day-coach to avoid the risk of
meeting any one he knew, and because he did
not wish to be comfortable. When the
telegram arrived, Alexander was at his rooms
on Tenth Street, packing his bag to go to Boston.
On Monday night he had written a long letter
to his wife, but when morning came he was
afraid to send it, and the letter was still
in his pocket. Winifred was not a woman
who could bear disappointment. She demanded
a great deal of herself and of the people
she loved; and she never failed herself.
If he told her now, he knew, it would be
irretrievable. There would be no going back.
He would lose the thing he valued most in
the world; he would be destroying himself
and his own happiness. There would be
nothing for him afterward. He seemed to see
himself dragging out a restless existence on
the Continent--Cannes, Hyeres, Algiers, Cairo--
among smartly dressed, disabled men of
every nationality; forever going on journeys
that led nowhere; hurrying to catch trains
that he might just as well miss; getting up in
the morning with a great bustle and splashing
of water, to begin a day that had no purpose
and no meaning; dining late to shorten the
night, sleeping late to shorten the day.
And for what? For a mere folly, a masquerade,
a little thing that he could not let go.
AND HE COULD EVEN LET IT GO, he told himself.
But he had promised to be in London at mid-
summer, and he knew that he would go. . . .
It was impossible to live like this any longer.
And this, then, was to be the disaster
that his old professor had foreseen for him:
the crack in the wall, the crash, the cloud
of dust. And he could not understand how it
had come about. He felt that he himself was
unchanged, that he was still there, the same
man he had been five years ago, and that he
was sitting stupidly by and letting some
resolute offshoot of himself spoil his life for
him. This new force was not he, it was but a
part of him. He would not even admit that it
was stronger than he; but it was more active.
It was by its energy that this new feeling got
the better of him. His wife was the woman
who had made his life, gratified his pride,
given direction to his tastes and habits.
The life they led together seemed to him beautiful.
Winifred still was, as she had always been,
Romance for him, and whenever he was deeply
stirred he turned to her. When the grandeur
and beauty of the world challenged him--
as it challenges even the most self-absorbed people--
he always answered with her name. That was his
reply to the question put by the mountains and the stars;
to all the spiritual aspects of life. In his feeling
for his wife there was all the tenderness,
all the pride, all the devotion of which he was
capable. There was everything but energy;
the energy of youth which must register itself
and cut its name before it passes. This new
feeling was so fresh, so unsatisfied and light
of foot. It ran and was not wearied, anticipated
him everywhere. It put a girdle round the
earth while he was going from New York
to Moorlock. At this moment, it was tingling
through him, exultant, and live as quicksilver,
whispering, "In July you will be in England."
Already he dreaded the long, empty days at sea,
the monotonous Irish coast, the sluggish
passage up the Mersey, the flash of the
boat train through the summer country.
He closed his eyes and gave himself up to the
feeling of rapid motion and to swift,
terrifying thoughts. He was sitting so, his face
shaded by his hand, when the Boston lawyer
saw him from the siding at White River Junction.
When at last Alexander roused himself,
the afternoon had waned to sunset. The train
was passing through a gray country and the
sky overhead was flushed with a wide flood of
clear color. There was a rose-colored light
over the gray rocks and hills and meadows.
Off to the left, under the approach of a
weather-stained wooden bridge, a group of
boys were sitting around a little fire.
The smell of the wood smoke blew in at the window.
Except for an old farmer, jogging along the highroad
in his box-wagon, there was not another living
creature to be seen. Alexander looked back wistfully
at the boys, camped on the edge of a little marsh,
crouching under their shelter and looking gravely
at their fire. They took his mind back a long way,
to a campfire on a sandbar in a Western river,
and he wished he could go back and sit down with them.
He could remember exactly how the world had looked then.
It was quite dark and Alexander was still
thinking of the boys, when it occurred to him
that the train must be nearing Allway.
In going to his new bridge at Moorlock he had
always to pass through Allway. The train
stopped at Allway Mills, then wound two
miles up the river, and then the hollow sound
under his feet told Bartley that he was on his
first bridge again. The bridge seemed longer
than it had ever seemed before, and he was
glad when he felt the beat of the wheels on
the solid roadbed again. He did not like
coming and going across that bridge, or
remembering the man who built it. And was he,
indeed, the same man who used to walk that
bridge at night, promising such things to
himself and to the stars? And yet, he could
remember it all so well: the quiet hills
sleeping in the moonlight, the slender skeleton
of the bridge reaching out into the river, and
up yonder, alone on the hill, the big white house;
upstairs, in Winifred's window, the light that told
him she was still awake and still thinking of him.
And after the light went out he walked alone,
taking the heavens into his confidence,
unable to tear himself away from the
white magic of the night, unwilling to sleep
because longing was so sweet to him, and because,
for the first time since first the hills were
hung with moonlight, there was a lover in the world.
And always there was the sound of the rushing water
underneath, the sound which, more than anything else,
meant death; the wearing away of things under the
impact of physical forces which men could
direct but never circumvent or diminish.
Then, in the exaltation of love, more than
ever it seemed to him to mean death, the only
other thing as strong as love. Under the moon,
under the cold, splendid stars, there were only
those two things awake and sleepless; death and love,
the rushing river and his burning heart.
Alexander sat up and looked about him.
The train was tearing on through the darkness.
All his companions in the day-coach were
either dozing or sleeping heavily,
and the murky lamps were turned low.
How came he here among all these dirty people?
Why was he going to London? What did it
mean--what was the answer? How could this
happen to a man who had lived through that
magical spring and summer, and who had felt
that the stars themselves were but flaming
particles in the far-away infinitudes of his love?
What had he done to lose it? How could
he endure the baseness of life without it?
And with every revolution of the wheels beneath
him, the unquiet quicksilver in his breast told
him that at midsummer he would be in London.
He remembered his last night there: the red
foggy darkness, the hungry crowds before
the theatres, the hand-organs, the feverish
rhythm of the blurred, crowded streets, and
the feeling of letting himself go with the
crowd. He shuddered and looked about him
at the poor unconscious companions of his
journey, unkempt and travel-stained, now
doubled in unlovely attitudes, who had come
to stand to him for the ugliness he had
brought into the world.
And those boys back there, beginning it
all just as he had begun it; he wished he
could promise them better luck. Ah, if one
could promise any one better luck, if one
could assure a single human being of happiness!
He had thought he could do so, once;
and it was thinking of that that he at last fell
asleep. In his sleep, as if it had nothing
fresher to work upon, his mind went back
and tortured itself with something years and
years away, an old, long-forgotten sorrow
of his childhood.
When Alexander awoke in the morning,
the sun was just rising through pale golden
ripples of cloud, and the fresh yellow light
was vibrating through the pine woods.
The white birches, with their little
unfolding leaves, gleamed in the lowlands,
and the marsh meadows were already coming to life
with their first green, a thin, bright color
which had run over them like fire. As the
train rushed along the trestles, thousands of
wild birds rose screaming into the light.
The sky was already a pale blue and of the
clearness of crystal. Bartley caught up his bag
and hurried through the Pullman coaches until he
found the conductor. There was a stateroom unoccupied,
and he took it and set about changing his clothes.
Last night he would not have believed that anything
could be so pleasant as the cold water he dashed
over his head and shoulders and the freshness
of clean linen on his body.
After he had dressed, Alexander sat down
at the window and drew into his lungs
deep breaths of the pine-scented air.
He had awakened with all his old sense of power.
He could not believe that things were as bad with
him as they had seemed last night, that there
was no way to set them entirely right.
Even if he went to London at midsummer,
what would that mean except that he was a fool?
And he had been a fool before. That was not
the reality of his life. Yet he knew that he
would go to London.
Half an hour later the train stopped at
Moorlock. Alexander sprang to the platform
and hurried up the siding, waving to Philip
Horton, one of his assistants, who was
anxiously looking up at the windows of
the coaches. Bartley took his arm and
they went together into the station buffet.
"I'll have my coffee first, Philip.
Have you had yours? And now,
what seems to be the matter up here?"
The young man, in a hurried, nervous way,
began his explanation.
But Alexander cut him short. "When did
you stop work?" he asked sharply.
The young engineer looked confused.
"I haven't stopped work yet, Mr. Alexander.
I didn't feel that I could go so far without
definite authorization from you."
"Then why didn't you say in your telegram
exactly what you thought, and ask for your
authorization? You'd have got it quick enough."
"Well, really, Mr. Alexander, I couldn't be
absolutely sure, you know, and I didn't like
to take the responsibility of making it public."
Alexander pushed back his chair and rose.
"Anything I do can be made public, Phil.
You say that you believe the lower chords
are showing strain, and that even the
workmen have been talking about it,
and yet you've gone on adding weight."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Alexander, but I had
counted on your getting here yesterday.
My first telegram missed you somehow.
I sent one Sunday evening, to the same address,
but it was returned to me."
"Have you a carriage out there?
I must stop to send a wire."
Alexander went up to the telegraph-desk and
penciled the following message to his wife:--
I may have to be here for some time.
Can you come up at once? Urgent.
BARTLEY.
The Moorlock Bridge lay three miles
above the town. When they were seated in
the carriage, Alexander began to question his
assistant further. If it were true that the
compression members showed strain, with the
bridge only two thirds done, then there was
nothing to do but pull the whole structure
down and begin over again. Horton kept
repeating that he was sure there could be
nothing wrong with the estimates.
Alexander grew impatient. "That's all
true, Phil, but we never were justified in
assuming that a scale that was perfectly safe
for an ordinary bridge would work with
anything of such length. It's all very well on
paper, but it remains to be seen whether it
can be done in practice. I should have thrown
up the job when they crowded me. It's all
nonsense to try to do what other engineers
are doing when you know they're not sound."
"But just now, when there is such competition,"
the younger man demurred. "And certainly
that's the new line of development."
Alexander shrugged his shoulders and
made no reply.
When they reached the bridge works,
Alexander began his examination immediately.
An hour later he sent for the superintendent.
"I think you had better stop work out there
at once, Dan. I should say that the lower chord
here might buckle at any moment. I told
the Commission that we were using higher
unit stresses than any practice has established,
and we've put the dead load at a low estimate.
Theoretically it worked out well enough,
but it had never actually been tried."
Alexander put on his overcoat and took
the superintendent by the arm. "Don't look
so chopfallen, Dan. It's a jolt, but we've
got to face it. It isn't the end of the world,
you know. Now we'll go out and call the men
off quietly. They're already nervous,
Horton tells me, and there's no use alarming them.
I'll go with you, and we'll send the end
riveters in first."
Alexander and the superintendent picked
their way out slowly over the long span.
They went deliberately, stopping to see what
each gang was doing, as if they were on an
ordinary round of inspection. When they
reached the end of the river span, Alexander
nodded to the superintendent, who quietly
gave an order to the foreman. The men in the
end gang picked up their tools and, glancing
curiously at each other, started back across
the bridge toward the river-bank. Alexander
himself remained standing where they had
been working, looking about him. It was hard
to believe, as he looked back over it,
that the whole great span was incurably disabled,
was already as good as condemned,
because something was out of line in
the lower chord of the cantilever arm.
The end riveters had reached the bank
and were dispersing among the tool-houses,
and the second gang had picked up their tools
and were starting toward the shore. Alexander,
still standing at the end of the river span,
saw the lower chord of the cantilever arm
give a little, like an elbow bending.
He shouted and ran after the second gang,
but by this time every one knew that the big
river span was slowly settling. There was
a burst of shouting that was immediately drowned
by the scream and cracking of tearing iron,
as all the tension work began to pull asunder.
Once the chords began to buckle, there were
thousands of tons of ironwork, all riveted together
and lying in midair without support. It tore
itself to pieces with roaring and grinding and
noises that were like the shrieks of a steam whistle.
There was no shock of any kind; the bridge had no
impetus except from its own weight.
It lurched neither to right nor left,
but sank almost in a vertical line,
snapping and breaking and tearing as it went,
because no integral part could bear for an instant
the enormous strain loosed upon it.
Some of the men jumped and some ran,
trying to make the shore.
At the first shriek of the tearing iron,
Alexander jumped from the downstream side
of the bridge. He struck the water without
injury and disappeared. He was under the
river a long time and had great difficulty
in holding his breath. When it seemed impossible,
and his chest was about to heave, he thought he
heard his wife telling him that he could hold out
a little longer. An instant later his face cleared the water.
For a moment, in the depths of the river, he had realized
what it would mean to die a hypocrite, and to lie dead
under the last abandonment of her tenderness.
But once in the light and air, he knew he should
live to tell her and to recover all he had lost.
Now, at last, he felt sure of himself.
He was not startled. It seemed to him
that he had been through something of
this sort before. There was nothing horrible
about it. This, too, was life, and life was
activity, just as it was in Boston or in London.
He was himself, and there was something
to be done; everything seemed perfectly
natural. Alexander was a strong swimmer,
but he had gone scarcely a dozen strokes
when the bridge itself, which had been settling
faster and faster, crashed into the water
behind him. Immediately the river was full
of drowning men. A gang of French Canadians
fell almost on top of him. He thought he had
cleared them, when they began coming up all
around him, clutching at him and at each
other. Some of them could swim, but they
were either hurt or crazed with fright.
Alexander tried to beat them off, but there
were too many of them. One caught him about
the neck, another gripped him about the middle,
and they went down together. When he sank,
his wife seemed to be there in the water
beside him, telling him to keep his head,
that if he could hold out the men would drown
and release him. There was something he
wanted to tell his wife, but he could not
think clearly for the roaring in his ears.
Suddenly he remembered what it was.
He caught his breath, and then she let him go.
The work of recovering the dead went
on all day and all the following night.
By the next morning forty-eight bodies had been
taken out of the river, but there were still
twenty missing. Many of the men had fallen
with the bridge and were held down under
the debris. Early on the morning of the
second day a closed carriage was driven slowly
along the river-bank and stopped a little
below the works, where the river boiled and
churned about the great iron carcass which
lay in a straight line two thirds across it.
The carriage stood there hour after hour,
and word soon spread among the crowds on
the shore that its occupant was the wife
of the Chief Engineer; his body had not
yet been found. The widows of the lost workmen,
moving up and down the bank with shawls
over their heads, some of them carrying
babies, looked at the rusty hired hack many
times that morning. They drew near it and
walked about it, but none of them ventured
to peer within. Even half-indifferent sight-
seers dropped their voices as they told a
newcomer: "You see that carriage over there?
That's Mrs. Alexander. They haven't found
him yet. She got off the train this morning.
Horton met her. She heard it in Boston yesterday
--heard the newsboys crying it in the street.
At noon Philip Horton made his way
through the crowd with a tray and a tin
coffee-pot from the camp kitchen. When he
reached the carriage he found Mrs. Alexander
just as he had left her in the early morning,
leaning forward a little, with her hand on the
lowered window, looking at the river. Hour
after hour she had been watching the water,
the lonely, useless stone towers, and the
convulsed mass of iron wreckage over which
the angry river continually spat up its yellow
foam.
"Those poor women out there, do they
blame him very much?" she asked, as she
handed the coffee-cup back to Horton.
"Nobody blames him, Mrs. Alexander.
If any one is to blame, I'm afraid it's I.
I should have stopped work before he came.
He said so as soon as I met him. I tried
to get him here a day earlier, but my telegram
missed him, somehow. He didn't have time
really to explain to me. If he'd got here
Monday, he'd have had all the men off at once.
But, you see, Mrs. Alexander, such a thing never
happened before. According to all human calculations,
it simply couldn't happen."
Horton leaned wearily against the front
wheel of the cab. He had not had his clothes
off for thirty hours, and the stimulus of violent
excitement was beginning to wear off.
"Don't be afraid to tell me the worst,
Mr. Horton. Don't leave me to the dread of
finding out things that people may be saying.
If he is blamed, if he needs any one to speak
for him,"--for the first time her voice broke
and a flush of life, tearful, painful, and
confused, swept over her rigid pallor,--
"if he needs any one, tell me, show me what to do."
She began to sob, and Horton hurried away.
When he came back at four o'clock in the
afternoon he was carrying his hat in his hand,
and Winifred knew as soon as she saw him
that they had found Bartley. She opened the
carriage door before he reached her and
stepped to the ground.
Horton put out his hand as if to hold her
back and spoke pleadingly: "Won't you drive
up to my house, Mrs. Alexander? They will
take him up there."
"Take me to him now, please. I shall not
make any trouble."
The group of men down under the riverbank
fell back when they saw a woman coming,
and one of them threw a tarpaulin over
the stretcher. They took off their hats
and caps as Winifred approached, and although
she had pulled her veil down over her face
they did not look up at her. She was taller
than Horton, and some of the men thought
she was the tallest woman they had ever seen.
"As tall as himself," some one whispered.
Horton motioned to the men, and six of them
lifted the stretcher and began to carry it up
the embankment. Winifred followed them the
half-mile to Horton's house. She walked
quietly, without once breaking or stumbling.
When the bearers put the stretcher down in
Horton's spare bedroom, she thanked them
and gave her hand to each in turn. The men
went out of the house and through the yard
with their caps in their hands. They were
too much confused to say anything
as they went down the hill.
Horton himself was almost as deeply perplexed.
"Mamie," he said to his wife, when he came out
of the spare room half an hour later,
"will you take Mrs. Alexander the things
she needs? She is going to do everything
herself. Just stay about where you can
hear her and go in if she wants you."
Everything happened as Alexander had
foreseen in that moment of prescience under
the river. With her own hands she washed
him clean of every mark of disaster. All night
he was alone with her in the still house,
his great head lying deep in the pillow.
In the pocket of his coat Winifred found the
letter that he had written her the night before
he left New York, water-soaked and illegible,
but because of its length, she knew it had
been meant for her.
For Alexander death was an easy creditor.
Fortune, which had smiled upon him
consistently all his life, did not desert him in
the end. His harshest critics did not doubt that,
had he lived, he would have retrieved himself.
Even Lucius Wilson did not see in this accident
the disaster he had once foretold.
When a great man dies in his prime there
is no surgeon who can say whether he did well;
whether or not the future was his, as it
seemed to be. The mind that society had
come to regard as a powerful and reliable
machine, dedicated to its service, may for a
long time have been sick within itself and
bent upon its own destruction. _
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