Death of Iron Read online

  To the information he thus obtained was joined that which resulted from the various mechanical tests. Machines as precise as watch-movements subjected the samples to slow traction, tension or torsion. The fact that they moved in well-oiled silence did not exclude their possession of indomitable force.

  The engineer, bending his thin, bony face over the machines, would follow the movement of a needle on a scale or of a stylograph across a drum. Levers as sensitive as the antennae of an insect seemed no more than the prolongations of his delicate fingers, as with the slightest of touches he applied the force that rent the material apart.

  In those machines chains were pulled to deformity and breakage; steel cables gave way, their sections vibrating one by one, as the torn ends leaped into the air like the heads of snakes.

  Another machine determined the hardness of steels by the depressions left in their surface by a ball driven into it by titanic pressure; another filed the surface with a curious duplication of human gestures in the process.

  Shining with reflections under the cold electric lights, the instruments appeared as torturing implements of some nightmare. Inquisition, at the same time suggesting the stiff movements of giant insects, which, with articulated limbs and heavy carapaces, tore to pieces in their mandibles the living body of the metal.

  IT WAS while testing samples of high-speed steel that Leclair thought he found the machines less supple and sensitive than before. One might almost have said that some heavy and ignorant hand had fumbled with them until they became tired from abnormal efforts; and yet the effect was so tenuous as to be beyond the range of observation. The engineer had only a vague impression of something that he was unable to pin down.

  Several days later, as he was passing through the lathe department he heard voices raised in argument. Choleur, the foreman, who exercised a violent and somewhat capricious authority over his subordinates, was shouting that someone had, for a second time, broken an important part of a big automatic lathe. The workman in charge of the implement was defending himself vigorously, and calling on his fellows to bear witness that he had regulated the instrument correctly. He complained that it must have contained some hidden defect which had brought about the fracture.

  In spite of his protests the mechanic was dismissed. But the man who replaced him was no more lucky; a few days later the main rod of a turret-lathe bent suddenly. Engaging in the mass of rotating metal the jaws tore loose the tools and their attachments, injuring the man who was guiding the machine. The same day the sliding parts of a big plane suddenly collapsed.

  Choleur filled the air with his curses.

  Suspicious and with side-glances at the men about him, he examined the sections that had failed. The idea that this series of accidents was not the result of chance had occurred to him. Lefevre had the same thought but neither of them could find the slightest basis for such a conclusion. They reluctantly accepted the misfortunes as purely fortuitous, when four days later, the main power-transmission shaft of the shop suddenly gave way, tearing down some of the steel trussing of the roof in its fall.

  Microscopic examination of the breakages revealed to Selevine a steel that had been submitted to extraordinary stresses fatigued by over-exertion.

  “It must be that big hammer,” he told Leclair when they were in the laboratory together, “the one they installed near the lathe-room recently. The continual shocks set up a vibration in machines already submitted to considerable strain, and in the long run bring about a modification in the structure of the metal which breaks down its resistance. At least, that’s the only explanation that occurs to me.”

  The electric light died out as he spoke, then flashed once, and went out for good.

  LECLAIR telephoned to Laval for the breakdown gang. The wire carried a series of not very pleasant remarks to his ears in reply. Annoyed by the imperative tone of the engineer, the mechanic was objecting vigorously.

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with everyone around here lately,” declared Leclair in an irritated tone. “If I were the boss . . . That man Laval is becoming impossible. He counts on his stand-in with you, and I can’t ask him to do a single thing without getting some kind of an insolent answer. With Martin, I ran into the same hostility, only he hides it under a good-natured air that doesn’t mean a thing. The old fool exaggerates his deafness so as to interpret orders in a manner to suit himself.

  “In order to avoid labor he deploys all the resources of his intelligence; once the danger of having to work is over he has to take a long rest to recover from the shock of being asked to do something. He sleeps on the job with a skinful of wine, too. Decidedly, these workmen have no ideal but getting drunk.”

  “At least that’s a concrete idea,” replied Selevine, tranquilly, “and about the only concrete idea that anyone has these days.”

  “Your point of view is all wrong, old man. Believe me, it’s necessary to be firm with people like that. The least indulgence they interpret as a sign of weakness. You have to be severe with them to get any respect. My predecessor at Said Machou was a humanitarian of your type. He had what are called “advanced ideas” and tried to apply some of them in the department he directed. The result was even beyond his hopes. Three months after he came on the job it was impossible to get any kind of effective work out of the laborers. Their demands grew in proportion to what they got The more inoffensive ones merely kept happily ‘stewed’ all day long. The workshops were full of public women and public brawls. At the least excuse the Italians hauled out their knives and threatened to start cutting throats. Most of the time they did their threatening from a distance, though—out of delicacy of sentiment, I suppose. Eveiy time they tried to clamp discipline on again there was a strike and a miniature riot.”

  “And then you appeared on the scene?”

  “I did. I chased the foreigners and horsewhipped a few of the natives—under due form of colonial justice, of course. But it was too late. They never really reestablished order.” Leclair’s glance fell on the big microscope of which Selevine was adjusting the screw. The half-shaded lamp lit the pale profile of the observer, outlining his sharp nose and finely-graven lips, and emphasizing the bitterness around the corners of the mouth and the heavy-lidded eyes, red with sleeplessness.

  “You’re tiring yourself, old man.” The other shrugged his shoulders. A vague pattern was audible in the adjacent corridor. Leclair glanced at the clock on the wall and as he did so, someone in a white laboratory coat entered.

  “Well, gang, it’s ‘the hour’ !”

  It was thus that Pillot designated the hour par excellence, the hour of quitting work. At the same moment came the piercing sound of the factory whistle.

  After a rapid toilet, the young men mingled with the crowd of laborers which the factories were disgorging into the mean streets of the industrial city.

  III

  The Soul of Metal

  LEAVING the factory, Leclair went home, slipped into his evening clothes and directed his steps toward the Morain home.

  His way lay through the hamlet of Trechy, almost entirely devoted to workmen’s homes; little narrow streets whose squat houses and smoke-grimed walls looked incredibly ugly in the trembling light of the old-fashioned street-lamps. A little further on, the buildings began to space out; he found himself in a district where a frantic, hurried existence was carried on behind glass and steel. Bridges swung their long legs across the waters of a canal. United by long lines of wire, electric moons threw their somewhat sinister light across the ocean. Coal dumps, rails, locomotives, piles of ore or scrap iron rose out of the darkness here and there.

  A quarry opened beside his path. Mercury-vapor lamps threw heavy shadows around laden men and overworked horses in the ravined declivities. A wheel turned at the shaft mechanism of a mine; a big machine moved somewhere with a rhythmical beat.

  Passing the Naval foundry he saw the red light streaking across the sky, while every one of a thousand windows reflected it back. Lit by the blazing furnaces below, the pillars of smoke took on a kind of magic splendor.

  But Leclair was indifferent to the splendor of the spectacle. He walked along in a kind of waking dream, his mind at random over the events of the day, his memories of the Rail Marocains, the thought of what his share in the commission on that sale would amount to, and the wife of his superior.

  With a certain simplicity, he argued out the affair: “She made a marriage of convenience. In a big city, she would already have taken a lover, but here the opportunity is lacking. Certainly she ought to be bored with life.” He did not carry this line of reasoning through to its logical conclusion, for, without in the least counting on her yielding to him, he was imagining a tender, almost Platonic love-affair, which would become more only by one of those accidents that chance places in the way of lovers.

  This hesitation in his imaginings was his sacrifice to decency; in a town of such limited social life an affair of this sort would become known at once. Morain was an attentive and jealous husband. If he harbored as much as one single suspicion, Leclair’s own future would be hopelessly compromised. That cold, strong man, so firm and broad of shoulder, would be difficult to deceive. It was hard to imagine him being affectionate, but Leclair who knew the household, had no doubts on that score.

  His imagination pictured the foundry-master bending his flowing grey moustache over Renée’s graceful neck, caressing her with his hands, his ruddy visage congested with desire, and the picture caused him a pang. Leclair, in his own imagination, was always the voluptuary who desires no more of love than its physical concomitants. But in the past the search had brought him more pain than delight, and his most glorious hours had been poisoned with a subtle venom.

  He had arrived at Ronceraies.

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; It was a beautiful place, situated about a league from the steel-mills and outside the agglomeration of workmen’s homes.

  Morain had acquired it from his predecessor, Deram, after having accomplished the ruin of the latter—by perfectly legal methods, of course. A little park, running right down to the river-bank, surrounded the house. Out here the comparative rarity of the omnipresent factories and the fact that the other buildings were more widely spaced out, permitted one a view of a more distant horizon, but one which ended at last in the blue smoke of the mills of Lourches. Through the calm water of the Escaut plowed the tugs with their trains of loaded barges, or other barges drawn by tractors which moved along the bank.

  In all this desert of steel and stone the little park with its shadowy vaults underneath the trees was one of the sweetest oases. Leclair, who had a slight headache—his ears still beat with the sound of the hammer and his eyes were spotted by the too-brilliant glare of the heated metal—took a little walk before going up to the house, breathing with pleasure the moist air from which the river had washed the weight of dust and smoke.

  IN THE smoking-room he found Selevine and Morain. A little later M. Fontaine came in. This scientist, thanks to the generosity of Morain, had been able to prepare a work on the microscopic structure of meteorites which he hoped would unlock the door of the Institute for him. A solid friendship united him to the foundry-master.

  A passionate lover of astronomy, Fontaine was particularly interested in the meteors whose fugitive brilliance animates our nights. He achieved a fine detachment from all that concerns this troubled globe of ours as he contemplated those sudden streaks of light in the black silence of the night-sky, or followed the trails of fire of the distant comets and the asteroids which the air destroys as a candle snuffs out insects—arid he expressed this detachment by wearing an old-fashioned necktie of faded silk. An indulgent skeptic, he made no parade of his knowledge; as a matter of fact, he did not even believe in the science to which he gave his life, following it only as a kind of mental gymnastic, a means of diversion for a man on his way to the grave.

  He had a marked appreciation for Selevine’s caustic spirit, and Morain never failed to invite the latter when the scientist was to call.

  Always dressed in dark clothes that accentuated the pallor of his countenance, Selevine was more often silent than speaking. Nevertheless, when drawn into some scientific controversy, or when anyone dared to deny one of the ideas that were his particular pets, he threw himself into the conversation with passionate ardor. His knowledge was immense, though badly ordered, and his imagination, though somewhat disciplined by the methodical German training he had received, often drew him out of the straight road of science into weird forests of fantasy. Morain, who at bottom thought him a barbarian, nevertheless appreciated his practical achievements at their full value.

  In physics and above all, on their mathematical side, he had carried his studies far. A follower of Lubatchewsky and Riemann, familiar with the work of the non-Euclidean geometrists, he frequently carried his hearers with him out of range of human perception and into the disconcerting regions of the fourth dimension; where the astronomer, in spite of his interest in things new and strange, always refused to follow. On such occasions a smile would play around Selevine’s mouth. Then becoming severely practical, he would discuss social questions, denouncing the iniquity of the rich and the misery forced upon the workers by capitalistic society. He held with Tolstoi, that modern civilization was responsible for all the evils that weigh upon humanity.

  Tonight he had engaged M. Fontaine in a discussion that both of them found extremely interesting; for Dr. Levysson and Breval had arrived and it was necessary to twice send the butler to remind the disputants that dinner was served.

  The mistress of the house came down and all went to the table.

  Little lamps with silk shades shed their soft light over the linen. The golden rays touched the hair of the young matron and caressed the pure and refined lines of her bare arms.

  She did the honors of the table and listened, with a far-away smile, to the compliments of her neighbors, the doctor, who rather fancied himself as a connoisseur of wine and women, and Breval, a well known painter, just back from a trip to the United States.

  The conversation at the beginning of the dinner touched on this subject and that but the inevitable shop-talk came up at last.

  MEANWHILE Leclair was watching, with some annoyance, as Dr. Levysson deployed all the graces of an old beau, bending toward his charming hostess a face already flushed with the first libations. A clang of silver woke the engineer from his reverie. He heard M. Fontaine saying:

  “My dear Selevine, the explanation you give for the peculiarities in your steels seems to me extremely specious.”

  “Do you know, Levysson,” said Morain, “you have a singular neighbor. I presented Selevine to you as an engineer and the head of my laboratories, but he is less an engineer than a philosopher, and less a philosopher than a Nihilist. He has curious views on the subject of matter and some of his notions, though they are based on a solid mathematical foundation, hark back to the alchemists of the middle ages. He attributes to metals a kind of life—slower than our own, but possessing a dumb sense of feeling and a kind of conscience. In fact he thinks he sees in metal all the manifestations that characterize organized beings, but in a rudimentary state. What do you think about that?”

  The doctor wiped his lips and replied with an air of profundity: “Yes. A good many physicians reason along these lines these days. They have been struck by certain phenomena common in metallic matter and the living cell. I think the analogy is far-fetched; after all it is no more than a play on words.”

  “A play on words!” exclaimed Morain. “Don’t you think that the crystal is the specific form of matter, the mineral germ, so to speak, which is born, reproduces itself, and finally dies?”

  The doctor shook his head. M. Fontaine, the thorough-going materialist, added another argument.

  “Boses has demonstrated that certain properties which were formerly believed the exclusive characteristics of living matter are also possessed by metals. Take the fatigue of steel, for instance, and the result of the application of certain depressants, drugs and poisons. Belaieff, a compatriot of Selevine’s, was the first to speak of the inherited characteristics of metals.”

  “You are right,” agreed the Russian. “The mechanical performance of a metal depends upon its history and the states it has already passed through. You can see it in the case of certain carbon-steels, made of scrap which has been melted down, and which have already left behind them five to ten generations of ‘metallic entity’. Chemically identical to the same steels made with fresh metals, they are more capricious in performance; they undergo spontaneous evolutions. The explanation I offer of the breakage of those machines is not at all incredible in this light.”

  “It’s possible,” approved the foundry-master, “but I fear that these conversations on mechanics are boring M. Breval.”

  The painter protested. “These questions have a good deal of technical interest.”

  “And considerable practical importance,” replied Morain. “Nothing that concerns iron should really leave us indifferent. Isn’t it the primordial element, and in a sense armament of modern civilization? No one really considers how much industry can modify the habits, the life and the development of a race. It is necessary for centuries to pass before the difference is really appreciated. In a few hundred years we will know, for the first time, how much steel, for example, has influenced human evolution, and they will speak of our age as the age of steel as we refer to the Stone Age or the Bronze Age.”

  “I hope,” put in Levysson, “that our distant grand-nephews won’t judge us solely by the uses we make of a single metal, no matter how essential it is. You see too many things from the metallurgists’s’ point of view, my dear Morain. What the devil! There are more important things in the world. The intelligence of man—”

  “The intelligence of man,” interrupted M. Fontaine “is specifically a manufacturing intelligence. It has no occupation but the creation of artificial organs which complete and supply the deficiencies of the human machine which is the means of support for the intelligence and which furnishes it with its means of action. The whole superiority of man over the animal, all the effort of the human mind, past and present, is comprehended in this—to invent and construct tools and machines. It is only by means of matter that the superior forms of life can conduct the battle with matter and this conflict will go on forever.”