A Poor Wise Man, Page 2

  CHAPTER II

  Shortly after the Civil War Anthony Cardew had left Pittsburgh and spenta year in finding a location for the investment of his small capital.That was in the very beginning of the epoch of steel. The iron businesshad already laid the foundations of its future greatness, but steel wasstill in its infancy.

  Anthony's father had been an iron-master in a small way, with a monthlypay-roll of a few hundred dollars, and an abiding faith in the future ofiron. But he had never dreamed of steel. But "sixty-five" saw the firststeel rail rolled in America, and Anthony Cardew began to dream. Hewent to Chicago first, and from there to Michigan, to see the firstsuccessful Bessemer converter. When he started east again he knew whathe was to make his life work.

  He was very young and his capital was small. But he had an abidingfaith in the new industry. Not that he dreamed then of floating steelbattleships. But he did foresee steel in new and various uses. Later onhe was experimenting with steel cable at the very time Roebling made ita commercial possibility, and with it the modern suspension bridge andthe elevator. He never quite forgave Roebling. That failure of his, thedifference only of a month or so, was one of the few disappointmentsof his prosperous, self-centered, orderly life. That, and Howard'smarriage. And, at the height of his prosperity, the realization thatHoward's middle-class wife would never bear a son.

  The city he chose was a small city then, yet it already showed signs ofapproaching greatness. On the east side, across the river, he built hisfirst plant, a small one, with the blast heated by passing through castiron pipes, with the furnaceman testing the temperature with strips oflead and zinc, and the skip hoist a patient mule.

  He had ore within easy hauling distance, and he had fuel, and he had,as time went on, a rapidly increasing market. Labor was cheap andplentiful, too, and being American-born, was willing and intelligent.Perhaps Anthony Cardew's sins of later years were due to a vastimpatience that the labor of the early seventies was no longer to behad.

  The Cardew fortune began in the seventies. Up to that time there wasa struggle, but in the seventies Anthony did two things. He went toEngland to see the furnaces there, and brought home a wife, a timid,tall Englishwoman of irreproachable birth, who remained always an alienin the crude, busy new city. And he built himself a house, a brick housein lower East Avenue, a house rather like his tall, quiet wife, and runon English lines. He soon became the leading citizen. He was one of thecommittee to welcome the Prince of Wales to the city, and from the verybeginning he took his place in the social life.

  He found it very raw at times, crude and new. He himself lived withdignity and elegant simplicity. He gave now and then lengthy, ponderousdinners, making out the lists himself, and handing them over to histimid English wife in much the manner in which he gave the wine list andthe key to the wine cellar to the butler. And, at the head of histable, he let other men talk and listened. They talked, those industrialpioneers, especially after the women had gone. They saw the city thecenter of great business and great railroads. They talked of its coal,its river, and the great oil fields not far away which were then intheir infancy. All of them dreamed a dream, saw a vision. But not all ofthem lived to see their dream come true.

  Old Anthony lived to see it.

  In the late eighties, his wife having been by that time decorouslyinterred in one of the first great mausoleums west of the mountains,Anthony Cardew found himself already wealthy. He owned oil wells andcoal mines. His mines supplied his coke ovens with coal, and his ownriver boats, as well as railroads in which he was a director, carriedhis steel.

  He labored ably and well, and not for wealth alone. He was one of agroup of big-visioned men who saw that a nation was only as great as itsindustries. It was only in his later years that he loved power forthe sake of power, and when, having outlived his generation, he haddeveloped a rigidity of mind that made him view the forced compromisesof the new regime as pusillanimous.

  He considered his son Howard's quiet strength weakness. "You have nostamina," he would say. "You have no moral fiber. For God's sake, make astand, you fellows, and stick to it."

  He had not mellowed with age. He viewed with endless bitterness thepassing of his own day and generation, and the rise to power of youngermen; with their "shilly-shallying," he would say. He was an aristocrat,an autocrat, and a survival. He tied Howard's hands in the management ofthe now vast mills, and then blamed him for the results.

  But he had been a great man.

  He had had two children, a boy and a girl. The girl had been the tragedyof his middle years, and Howard had been his hope.

  On the heights outside the city and overlooking the river he owned afarm, and now and then, on Sunday afternoons in the eighties, he droveout there, with Howard sitting beside him, a rangy boy in his teens,in the victoria which Anthony considered the proper vehicle forSunday afternoons. The farmhouse was in a hollow, but always on thoseexcursions Anthony, fastidiously dressed, picking his way half-irritablythrough briars and cornfields, would go to the edge of the cliffs andstand there, looking down. Below was the muddy river, sluggish always,but a thing of terror in spring freshets. And across was the east side,already a sordid place, its steel mills belching black smoke that killedthe green of the hillsides, its furnaces dwarfed by distance and height,its rows of unpainted wooden structures which housed the mill laborers.

  Howard would go with him, but Howard dreamed no dreams. He was a sturdy,dependable, unimaginative boy, watching the squirrels or flinging stonesover the palisades. Life for Howard was already a thing determined. Hewould go to college, and then he would come back and go into the milloffices. In time, he would take his father's place. He meant to do itwell and honestly. He had but to follow. Anthony had broken the trail,only by that time it was no longer a trail, but a broad and easy way.

  Only once or twice did Anthony Cardew give voice to his dreams. Once hesaid: "I'll build a house out here some of these days. Good location.Growth of the city is bound to be in this direction."

  What he did not say was that to be there, on that hill, overlooking hisactivities, his very own, the things he had builded with such labor,gave him a sense of power. "This below," he felt, with more of pridethan arrogance, "this is mine. I have done it. I, Anthony Cardew."

  He felt, looking down, the pride of an artist in his picture, of asculptor who, secure from curious eyes, draws the sheet from the stillmoist clay of his modeling, and now from this angle, now from that,studies, criticizes, and exults.

  But Anthony Cardew never built his house on the cliff. Time was to comewhen great houses stood there, like vast forts, overlooking, almostmenacing, the valley beneath. For, until the nineties, although the citydistended in all directions, huge, ugly, powerful, infinitely rich, andwhile in the direction of Anthony's farm the growth was real and rapid,it was the plain people who lined its rapidly extending avenues withtheir two-story brick houses; little homes of infinite tendernessand quiet, along tree-lined streets, where the children played on thecobble-stones, and at night the horse cars, and later the cable system,brought home tired clerks and storekeepers to small havens, alreadygrowing dingy from the smoke of the distant mills.

  Anthony Cardew did not like the plain people. Yet in the end, it was theplain people, those who neither labored with their hands nor livedby the labor of others--it was the plain people who vanquished him.Vanquished him and tried to protect him. But could not. A smallish man,hard and wiry, he neither saved himself nor saved others. He had onefetish, power. And one pride, his line. The Cardews were iron masters.Howard would be an iron master, and Howard's son.

  But Howard never had a son.