Gone!

{{sm|Author of “The Mississippi Bubble,” “54-40 or Flight,” etc}}|undefined}

ITH all the fire of his Magyar blood, Matchek loved Rosa Drelka. He was a beast of burden in the old country, eater of unknown things, toiler through unmeasured hours; but he loved. The world must have its beasts of burden.

Lured by the blandishments of stump-lands in the West, the Drelkas went across seas. Matchek followed. Being pretty, and of some wit, Rosa rebelled at the thought of toil with ax and mattock, and stopped off at a big manufacturing city midway. Matchek stopped also. It was fate, of course, that he should follow her: and, for that matter, that Zulinski should later do the same.

In every village game and every village fight, back in the old country, Zulinski had beaten Matchek; but Rosa dismissed neither, and kept her own counsel regarding both. Matchek may have been stupid not to have suspected that Zulinski would also come and find work in the steel-mills. This same stupidity refused to understand the language of the coachman’s kick, when the latter invited him to leave the back door of the Weems-Jordans’, where Rosa was housemaid—by virtue of being pretty and of some wit. Matchek was used to being kicked; it really annoyed him very little. He only wanted to be near Rosa. That maiden at last promised to marry him as soon as he had fifty-six dollars saved, to furnish the house.

For a time, Matchek was happy, in his way. There are different ways. He could eat sausages three times a week if he liked, and still put something in his savings-box. He spent little at the saloons across the street from the mill entrance, and by reason of this was not popular with his fellows. Small heaven was there for these stolid, grimy ones, dark, dirty, bunchy built, who bore the heat and burden of steel bridges and giant frames and miles of rails upon their hooped shoulders. Drink—that was all they could have. Hope they could not—not any of them except Matchek, who still was young, and who had Rosa’s promise. He was bent upon saving the fifty-six dollars, which would place him master of a very fine household.

Not quite so splendid a menage, this purposed one of Matchek’s, as that of the Weems-Jordans’; or that of Jerolson, president of the works where Weems-Jordan was second vice-president. The latter was not apt to go much higher, for toll had been taken of him in his day by these infernos of the mills, craving always food of mineral and men. Jerolson was strong, and to the strong go the spoils. His house was as finely furnished as any on Fifth Avenue; and continually Jerolson threatened the Board that he would pull up and go to Fifth Avenue; so that the Board paid him ever more.

Matchek never saw the edge of the interior of the Weems-Jordan home, going no farther than the back door. Rosa knew many things that went on there, but Rosa was of some wit. All Matchek knew was that he could eat sausages three times a week; and for this heaven all he had to do was to work in heat which made the nails on his overalls too hot to touch; and to wheel barrows of spiegel-metal and flux out over the “bridge” and pour them, at just the right moment, into the maw of a vast, crawling pot fresh up from hell, seething, terrible. Toward this great pot, a dozen feet across of blighting heat, the lever-operator in the “pulpit” turned over now and again the triple hell of the vast egg-shaped “converter,” glowing white hot, full of molten metal, a chaos-case, nebulous, awful as creation before dawn. From this slow-turning cosmos heat Matchek might not shrink at his station on the bridge. As the vast, splendid arch of white and yellow sparks, beautiful, significant, gushed out across the bridge, as the converging heats of this tilting, triple hell approached the heats of the sliding hell beneath him—why, all that Matchek had to do was to tilt his barrow of fluxing material into the maw of the lower hell; and then of course, to repeat this. And what was this, if it meant tri-weekly sausages and Rosa?

Matchek grew so that he could gaze down into the caldron beneath him. It was full of bridges and buildings unborn, full of beams and rails and iron webs; but Matchek did not see them. He saw the face of Rosa. Almost any month now he might have fifty-six dollars saved. Let the ladle scorch him, and the converter blind him, and the white sparks eat at his tough hide. Things of no consequence.

So finally Matchek and Rosa were married.

But now Zulinski after a time came to that city, and found work in another part of the mill. He rose swiftly. In time he secured the place of engineer on one of the little dummy-engines which chug all about through the great buildings of the steel-works. His stubby cars carried the ten-foot ingots of white-hot steel in their cases, fresh from the giant ladle. His little chain of squirming wagons crawled alongside the giant ladle every hour or two, waiting for its load of metal chrysalises. The ladle, yearning, half the sex of steel, crawled Titan-wise over to the converter, the other half; a giant of force, of molten power. Titan-wise, Matchek, at the signal of the high priest in the pulpit, consummated this continual cosmos wedding. The ladle crawled back, Titanic, and in time poured forth these white-hot chrysalises for Zulinski to haul away. And Zulinski took them to a place where giant hands reached down softly and pulled off the cases, and left the effulgent steel. After this they were sent to the rolling floor, where they were swept up and down by giant, gentle hydraulics, through triple anguish of crushing and molding—as you and I are swept, and so refined and shaped of life at last—until finally this imago of this steel, this soul, emerged in “I” beams as long as your office floor, or in rails which carry you and your children to pleasure or, if Matchek and Zulinski worked badly, perchance to death.

These two men were always close to each other, advancing, receding; but for a long time neither knew his enemy was at hand. Back of Zulinski, in his little engine cab, rose a vast shield of steel, to prevent his spine from being seared by the heat of the ingots which he carried. Both were busy, and the noise was that of mingled hells; so neither said of the other, “There is mine enemy!”

And in the main offices neither Jerolson nor Weems-Jordan said of the other, “There is mine enemy!” They were partitioned apart. For the matter of that, Weems-Jordan did not know any more than Matchek knew. Rosa might have told Matchek what she knew of Jerolson’s visits when Weems-Jordan was out of town; but Rosa very well knew on which side her bread was sausaged; and the Weems-Jordan house was a castle of secrecy. Rosa did not tell her husband. Instead, she told her lover, Zulinski, so readily do foreigners learn our customs.

You should have seen Mrs. Weems-Jordan. Then, perhaps—if you had been one sort of man—you would have said that no one could blame Jerolson. At least, Jerolson coveted his neighbor’s wife—her dark eyes, her heavy hair, her red cheek, her deep figure, her step of springy steel. And she was so serene, so innocent and calm. She was pretty and of good wit.

But at last, of course, Weems-Jordan found it out. “You cad, you beast!” he sobbed, helpless, before Jerolson. “You say it was her fault—I'll kill you!”

“No, you won't,” said Jerolson, removing his hand from the drawer, with the pistol he had been grasping. “There are plain-clothes men all about the place. Besides, what’s the use? You can’t help it now—can’t any of us help it. It wasn’t my fault she married you. The best thing for you to do, under the circumstances, is to get a divorce. I'll attend to that. I'll give you four hundred thousand; and you can stay right along here where you are. We're going to New York.”

Weems-Jordan’s head was wobbling oddly from side to side. “But Mrs. Jerolson, too?” he muttered thickly.

Jerolson bit a cigar. “Oh, that’s begun already,” he said. “Why, you didn’t think I wasn’t going to marry Alice, did you? Why, I always want to do what’s right.” He spoke as one aggrieved.

Weems-Jordan’s face twitched suddenly. “Alice!” he whispered; then sat upright or an instant before he dropped forward across the great desk top, his hand turning up limply.

Jerolson looked at this, paling a bit. Then he called out to a man to hurry, touched buttons, hastened messengers.

“Jordan’s had some sort of stroke,” he explained.

The immediate horror of death held him for a moment, but as the blood surged back a slow change worked across his face. His eye took on exultation. “So much better this way,” he muttered; “so very much better!” Indeed, little remained now for Jerolson to do except to wait a decent time, which, indeed was so much better.

It was on that very day when Weems-Jordan fell dead in the office, as it chanced, that Matchek met Zulinski. Matchek had before that seen and heard things that set his thick head to guessing. It had been some sort of Magyar fate by which Zulinski had found Rosa again, even after her marriage. Now, Zulinski and Matchek were both coming out of the mill doors as the day shift poured out its stream, and Matchek saw Zulinski’s dinner-bucket, and saw also the whole story at a flash! Whereupon, he attacked his enemy without tarrying. They fought, bit, clawed about the street, until a lazy officer kicked them apart. “The beasts!” grumbled the latter to a bystander. “It’s like little, small mad bulls they be. They doesn’t fight like rale min!” But Rosa wept, denied, confessed; wept, yielded, promised; and Matchek still ate at his own table. He was not so polite as Weems-Jordan, and did not die.

Now Zulinski, as an engineer, was practically a noble, for he ate sausages seven times a week, and had cheese when he liked. Zulinski, by the way, concluded to kill Matchek.

The inferno under the wide black roofs went on, screaming, wailing, gnashing, grinding. The vast forces of these cavernous depths flung ton-bulks about here and there, gently, irresistibly. A clattering, rending, ripping, crushing was all about. The heat was a thing of horror. To be sure, in such places a man must die now and then. But not even the foreman of the Bessemer rooms—where men and boys continually get enwrapped by flaming ribbons, which cut to the bone of leg or arm, or sear and sever arteries inches deep remembered anything worse than this affair of Matchek and Zulinski.

The rolls do not think, though they stretch ten tons of steel; nor do the shears which snip off a rail, nor the punches which lightly perforate a beam, nor the drills which softly penetrate a plate. No more should Zulinski or Matchek think; and surely it was no right thing for Zulinski to leave his engine-cab. The man at the throttle, great or small, belonged there and not elsewhere, for the ladle and the converter and their child, the ingot, and the screaming bar in the rolls, and the man in the pulpit, and the man at barrow or cab, were all units of one machine—the sacred machine, the Industry.

But when Zulinski from his engine-cab craned up at Matchek on the bridge, hate filled his soul, and he forgot his duty. After all, Rosa at the back door was his, as much as Alice at the front door was Jerolson’s. Was not an engineer better than a barrow-man, different, higher, better? Was not the master of the mills better than any man beneath him? Did not the paper say that he took what he liked, being rich? The death, the ruin—what matter those, for persons of situation?

So Zulinski slipped down from his cab and stole around into the darkness of the tracks, hid in glooms and groans and the wail of the tortured steel. Matchek could not see Zulinski so well, for the curtain of the converter’s arch of splendid light made an intermediate veil of impenetrable darkness to him; and, besides that, his feet were heavy as he dragged back and forth along the bridge, and he was listless, thinking when he had no right to think.

It was easy for Zulinski to slip up the dark and greasy stairs to the level of the pulpit and the bridge, and thus to get directly behind Matchek as he leaned against the iron pillar, between trips out over the bridge and above the giant ladle of seething steel. Men moved about in the darkness of the mills, and none of the pulpit men knew Zulinski, even had they noticed him. But you may know how bitter was the hate in Zulinski’s heart now; for instead of waiting until Matchek came back and leaned against the pillar, where he could easily be stabbed under the shoulder, Zulinski could not wait.

The operator in the pulpit pulled a lever; the giant converter swung over in its slow orbit, sending out its torrent-arch of flame; and Matchek and his barrow started out. After him slipped a figure which the man in the pulpit then knew did not belong there. But it was of no use then to call out or shout an order.

The foreman reported the incident to Jerolson.

“Meagher, those things have got to stop,” said the latter, his face haggard. “The papers are after us all the time—after me—spite of all I’ve done for this town. I’m going to quit ’em. Jerolson’ll go to New York, that’s what Jerolson’ll do.”

“But this is something worse than—”

“What? What’s that? What was it all about, anyway?”

“Some sort of fight the two had there on the bridge.”

“What was it about?”

“Well, I don’t know, sir; but they both went into the ladle. Bury them? Why, there ain’t no need to. Bury—why, sir, they ain’t dead, they’re just Gone! Not a hair nor a button left—just GONE, that’s all!”

Jerolson sat up erect, his dull eyes turning on the foreman. “What was it about?” he asked again.

The foreman grinned, and confessed. “Woman, sir. Engineer’d been fooling around the other fellow’s wife.”

Jerolson sank down in his chair. “What did you do with the ladle?” he asked hoarsely

“Run it in, sir,” replied Meagher “Ingots 29 and 30, day shift—”

“Stop it!” cried Jerolson. “Order the rolls stopped. Where is that cast? Where’ve they gone?”

The foreman smiled at this. “Why, Mr. Jerolson,” he replied, “how can I tell that? That lot is through the rolls long ago—into ‘I’-beams on the Davidson & Davidson order.”

“Can’t you trace it any way?” But the foreman shook his head. He did not hear Jerolson mutter:

“Davidson & Davidson—why, they're building my house—for her—Alice!”

The thing took possession of Jerolson. All the city wondered, but the works blew out, stopped, caked, hopeless, as terrible idle as when busy, an arrested hell of heat and clamor, now a hell of ice and silence.

Jerolson did not go his wonted way that night; instead, he wandered over to the naked, silent mills, to the Bessemer rooms. He stepped up the slippery, greasy stairs which Zulinski had ascended, peered in at the pulpit with its tangle of levers, walked out on the bridge, gazed over at the caked converter, down at the gorged ladle below him. So this was the place where it had happened? Yes; but there had been some mistake. Jerolson put his hand to his forehead, and drew it away damp. He looked at his quaking hand. But this was the place. Only, there had been a mistake. Because the face down below there, staring up, was not that of Matchek, but of Weems-Jordan!

They found Jerolson on his knees, moaning some useless prayer of self-pity, mumbling something about the blotting out of transgression. This was why Jerolson never went to New York, and never married Alice; and never worked any more.