Chapter XXV (1)

It was a sullen evening in mid-August, following a breathless day and an angry sunset that had shed a copper-colored glow above a bank of cloud. The great windows of the drawing-room of the Channel House were flung open wide, and on the terrace beneath the starless heaven sat the little group of intimates, which now included the placid lady of the little Kilburn house. Walter Herold, who had returned from Switzerland tanned and strong, told his adventures to Sir Oliver and Dr. Ransome, while John and Stella, a little way apart, listened idly. Lady Blount and Miss Lindon murmured irrelevances concerning the curates of long ago and the present price of beef. They had many points at which the curves of their natures touched, such as mathematicians, with unique spasm of romance, call points of osculation.

But for the voices all was still. From below, at the base of the cliff, came the lazy lapping of the sea against the rocks. Outside the glow of light cast by the illuminated drawing-room the world was pitch black. The air grew more and more oppressive.

“I think there’s going to be thunder,” said Lady Blount.

“I hope not,” said Miss Lindon. “I know John thinks it foolish, but I’m terribly afraid of thunder.”

“So does Sir Oliver; but I don’t care. Whenever there’s a thunder-storm, I go up to my room and put my head under the bedclothes until it’s over.”

“Now isn’t that remarkable, my dear,” said Miss Lindon--“I do exactly the same! I draw down the blinds, and hide scissors away in a drawer, and throw a woolen shawl over the steel fender, and then I put my head under the blankets. My Aunt Margery, I remember, invariably used to go and sit in the coal-cellar. But she was a strong-minded woman, and would put her foot on a black beetle as soon as look at it. I hope I’m fond of most of God’s creatures, but a black beetle frightens me out of my wits.”

“What do you think of thunder-storms, Stella?” John asked, knocking the ashes out of his pipe.

“I’m rather frightened,” she confessed. “Not because I think they’ll hurt me.” She paused and sighed. “I never could understand them.”

“What do you mean by understanding a thunder-storm?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “You either understand things or you don’t.”

Herold broke in to spare her further explanation. “There was a splendid one the week before last in the mountains--a real _Walpurgisnacht_. It seemed as though hell had broken loose.”

He described it in his vivid way. The elderly ladies looked at the glimmer of white shirt-front and the glowing cigarette-end by which alone he was revealed, and wondered at the heroical, or, as it seemed in the unconfessed depths of their souls, the God-defying qualities of male humanity. A few resounding splashes fell from the sky. The party rose hurriedly.

“Gad! we’re in for it,” cried Sir Oliver. “Let us get indoors.”

A flash of lightning rent the southern sky, and a clap of thunder broke over the channel, and the rain came down like a waterspout. In the drawing-room Lady Blount put her hand before her eyes.

“You must all forgive me. I can’t stand it. I must go up-stairs. Besides, it’s late, very near bed-time. My dear Miss Lindon, shall we go?”

The two old ladies, after hasty good nights, retired to the protection of their respective bedclothes. A great wind arose and swept through the room, blowing over a vase of flowers on the piano. Dr. Ransome, who happened to be standing near, mopped up the water with his handkerchief. Herold sprang to the window and shut it. Stella was by his side. Another flash sped through the blackness, and the thunder followed. They drew near together and waited for the next.

Sir Oliver hospitably pushed John and the old doctor toward the drawing-room door. “There are drinks in the library. It’ll be cozier there, on the other side of the house, away from this confounded racket. Come along, Walter. Stella darling, you had better go to bed. It’s the best place for little girls in a thunder-storm.”

She turned, the breadth of the drawing-room separating Walter Herold and herself from the others.

“I’ll stay up a little longer and look at it, dear Excellency,” she said, with a smile. “I’ll come into the library later and tell you all good night.”

At this announcement, and Stellamaris’s announcements had ever been sovereign decrees, John and Dr. Ransome, standing by the open door, obeyed the courteous wave of Sir Oliver’s hand. The old man waited for Herold, who advanced a pace or two.

“I suppose you’re dying for whisky and soda,” said Stella, resignedly.

He stopped short. “Not in the least. I would far rather look at this,”--he flung a hand toward the window,--“if you would let me.”

“Only for five minutes, Favorite dear; then I’ll send you away.”

Sir Oliver went out, shutting the door behind him. Herold and Stellamaris were alone in the spacious room. There came another flash and the thunder peal, and the rain spattered hard on the stone terrace.

“Why shouldn’t we sit down?” he asked, and drew a small settee to the window.

She stood, expectant of the lightning. It came and lit up a suddenly tempestuous sea. With her eyes straining at the blackness, she said in a low voice:

“Turn out the lights. This is all that matters.”

He went to the door, snapped the electric switches, and the darkness was so absolute that he waited for the next flash to see his way across the room. They sat down together side by side. A flash of vehement and reiterated radiance revealed a God’s wrath of spindrift scattered from mountainous waves that tossed in the middle distance the three-masted skeleton of a ship, and blasted the chalk-cliffed promontory to the west into a leprous tongue. They watched in silence for a long, long time. Save for the lightning, pitch blackness enveloped them. The rain swished heavily against the windows, and the surf roared on the rocks below. After a livid revelation of elemental welter and the deafening crash of cataclysm, she clutched his arm. When the peal had rolled away into an angry rumble, he whispered:

“Are you frightened?”

“No,” she replied, also below her breath, “not frightened. It excites me, it makes me feel, it makes me think. I seem to be understanding things I never understood before. Don’t let us speak.”

To remove impression of rebuke, her hand slid down his arm, found his hand, and held it. Neither spoke. After a while he scanned her face by the lightning. It was set, as though she saw a vision, her eyes gleaming, her lips parted. At the thunderclap her grasp involuntarily tightened. Again and again her face was startlingly visible. Herold’s mind went back down the years. He had seen that rapt expression times without number when she lay by the window of her sea-chamber and looked out into the mysteries of sea and sky; and times without number she had held his hand while her spirit, as he had loved fantastically to believe, went forth to dance with her sisters of the foam or to walk secure through the gates of the sunset. And he had loved to believe, too, that his own spirit, in some blind, attendant way, though lagging far behind, followed hers over the borders of the Land That Never Was. Sensitive to her moods, he felt now a strange excitement. She had become once more the Stellamaris of the cloudless and mystical years. The sea that had rejected her had again claimed her for its own, and was delivering into her keeping mysteries such as it had withheld from her even then; for she had found no message in the war of elements, mysteries deep and magnificent. He returned her tense pressure, and followed her spirit out into the vastness.

The storm grew fiercer. Every few moments spasms of livid daylight rent the darkness and dazzlingly illuminated the eager faces of the pair, the window-jambs and transoms, the terrace, the howling waste beyond, the skeleton ship tossing grimly, the promontory, the pitch black of the sky; and the thunder burst in awful detonations over their heads. Unconsciously and instinctively Stellamaris had drawn nearer to him, and her arm rested against his. After a long time, in the stillness of the dark, he spoke like one in a dream:

“The terrible splendor of life, that is the secret--the terrible splendor.”

She awoke almost with a shock, and, turning round, shook him by the lapel of his coat.

“How did you know, Walter? How did you know?”

Her voice quavered; he felt that she was trembling. A flash showed her straining her eyes into his face. They waited for the thunderclap during a second of intensity.

“What?” he asked.

“Those words. Those very words had just come to me, the meaning of everything. The terrible splendor of life. How did you know?”

“It was our souls that were going together through the storm.”

She released him, and withdrew a little.

“Did you know all that I was thinking?”

“Or all that the sea was telling you?”

“Did you feel that, too?” she asked breathlessly.

“I think so,” he replied.

“It was strange,” she said. “I hardly knew that I was here. I seemed to be away in the midst of it all, but I don’t think I lost consciousness. I had adventures--curious adventures.” She paused abruptly, then she continued: “They seemed to be definite then, but they are all a blur now. It was a kind of battle between man and evil forces, and I think I felt a voice speaking through it, and saying that the splendor of man would never be subdued; and the impression I’ve got is, that I saw something, whether it was a shape or a scene I don’t know, but something great and grand and fierce and heroic, and the voice told me it was life. The only thing I have clear is the words, ‘the terrible splendor of life,’ the words you plucked out of me.”

“It is the great secret,” he said.

“Yes.”

There was another silence. The storm began to pass gradually away. The lightning became rarer, and the intervals longer between flash and thunder.

“It is beginning to be clear,” she said at last. “All that has troubled me. All that you guessed I was feeling, and that I told you of only when you compelled me. You have been right. Once--do you remember?--you said that if I saw God through the beauty and the vanity of the world all would be well.”

“I ought to have told you to see Him through the pain of the world,” said Herold.

“You have told me that, in other words, ever since; and I was deaf.”

“Not I, dear,” said Herold.

“Yes, you. Now I understand.” She drew a deep breath. “Now I understand. It’s like an open book. That woman--Unity--wait,” she paused, and put her two hands to her head in the darkness. “I have a glimmer of a memory--it’s so illusive. It seems that I saw Unity just now. I understand all that she was, all that she meant.” A flash showed the sea. “Yes, I was out there,” she cried excitedly, and pointed. “Just out there.” Darkness engulfed them. “I forget,” she faltered, “I forget.”

“But the sea has taken you back at last, Stellamaris,” said Herold.

She seized his hand and held it during the peal. Then she cried in a tone of sudden terror:

“Walter!”

“Yes?”

“What you said--your prophesy--the comfort of the sea--the deeper meaning--”

He leaped to his feet.

“Don’t think anything more of it. They were just foolish words to comfort you. You and I seem to have been on the Edge of Beyond and looked over, and we’re not quite normal. We must get down now to practical things. I’m just what I always was, dear, a fantastic person who rode with you into fairy-land. I am still. Nothing more.”

“Are you quite sure?” suddenly asked a deep voice out of the blackness of the room.

Stella with a little cry of fright sprang to Herold for protection. For a second or two they were still. In their exaltation the question seemed to come from some vast depth of the abysm of time. Their hearts beat fast, and they clung together, listening, and there was not a sound. Then the lightning played its dancing daylight about the room, and they saw John Risca standing by the door. They sprang apart.

In another moment the room was flooded with electric light. The drawing-room, for all its beauty, looked mean and unimportant. The lights showed up glaringly an old Florentine tapestry over the chimney-piece. It seemed to have singularly little relation to life. It jarred impertinently.

“I came in to find Walter,” said John; “I didn’t think Stella was still up. It’s late. You didn’t hear me. I’m sorry I inadvertently overheard.”

“There’s nothing, my dear John, that you could not have heard,” said Herold.

John came forward in his lumbering way.

“I know that, Walter.”

For a minute or two no one spoke. The three stood stock-still, their hearts thumping. Outside, the rain fell pitilessly on the flags of the terrace, and the waning storm flashed and growled. John’s burning eyes looked at Herold beneath heavy, knitted brows. At last he said:

“You love Stella. You have loved her always. You never told me.”

“That is not so,” said Herold. “You have found us in a foolishly false position. A thunder-storm is an emotional piece of business. My old intimacy with Stella has its privileges. I’ll leave you. Stella will speak for herself.”

John stretched out a detaining arm. “No, my friend; stay. We three must have a talk together. It was bound to come sooner or later. Let it be now.”

He spoke quietly, with dignity and authority.

“There is nothing for us to talk about,” said Herold,--Stellamaris stood clutching the back of an arm-chair, and looking from one man to the other,--“the words you overheard ought to tell you that. And in answer to your question, I can say that I am quite sure.”

“You lie,” said John, quietly. “You lie out of the loyalty of your heart--” he raised his great hand to check the other’s outburst--“God Almighty in Heaven knows I’m not accusing you. If ever man had deep and devoted and unselfish love from another, I’ve had it from you. And I have it still. It’s a matter not of reproach, but of reparation.”

“Don’t you think,” said Herold, “we might continue this extraordinary conversation in the library--by ourselves?”

“No,” said John in the obstinate tone that Herold had known for many years. “You and I are two men, and Stella is a woman, and a hell-mess just like that--” he pointed to the tempest--“has upset our lives. It’s time to put them to rights again.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Herold. “It’s a pity you have chosen to-night. Things are a bit abnormal. Let us go to bed and talk to-morrow, if you like, in the light of common sense.”

John folded his arms. “I’m going to talk to-night. I want you calmly to consider the position.”

“I do,” said Herold. “Stop,”--as John was about to interrupt,--“let me speak.”

“Yes,” said Stella, breaking silence for the first time; “let Walter speak.”

But she stood apart, fascinated by this strange duel, as her primitive ancestress might have done when two males fought for her with flint-headed axes.

“What I feel as regards Stella is neither here nor there. I’ve never told her that I loved her. I’ve never told you. Both you and she have told me that you loved each other. That was enough for me. I joined with Unity in seeking to remove the obstacle in the path of your happiness. If Unity had not forestalled me, I--well, God knows what I should have done! I left you asleep that evening, and went, half crazy, to the flat, and there I found what I found. But, anyhow, Unity committed murder and suicide to set the two of you free. If you want strong, blatant words, there you have them. A girl, one of God’s chosen, has laid down her life for the two of you.” He stood between them and threw up his hands. “Take each other. It is a sacrament.”

Stella, her arms still on the back of the chair, hung her head and stared downward. John cast a quick glance at her and then, a thing which he rarely did, drew his great frame up to its full height and challenged his friend.

“If you don’t love her, she loves you. I know.”

Herold said:

“You two belong to each other.”

“Then Stella must decide,” said John.

She threw out a flutter of delicate fingers and covered her face. “No, no!” she gasped.

The lightning flickered mildly in the well-lit room, and the eventual thunder reverberated in distant anger.

John again came close to Herold. “This may be an extraordinary conversation, but it has to be. If Stella loved me, do you think she would stand like that?”

Stella dropped to her knees, her face and arms huddled against the chair.

“My dear old man, I’ve learned many things of late. I can’t tell you exactly. I’m not good at that sort of thing. But Unity has been too big for me.”

Stella raised a white face.

“What do you mean? Say exactly what you mean.”

“I mean--oh, God knows what I mean.” He strode blindly across the room, returned, and faced the two, still near together. “Can’t you understand?” he cried, with a wide gesture. “I’m infinitesimal sand beneath that child’s feet. I’m a blind mole in comparison with her transcendent vision. I’m in the dust. Oh, God!” He turned away.

Stella rose, and, clasping hands to her bosom, went to him.

“Belovedest, for Heaven’s sake what is the end of all this?”

He halted and took her hands.

“Not shadows, not lies. Once I thought--indeed, I knew--you loved me. That was when you were an ignorant child. You loved some one you thought was me. Now your eyes are opened. You have passed through flames. Knowledge has come to you. You see me as I am, and your love has gone. I know, too, what I am. Unity has taught me. You can’t--you don’t love me, Stella. That I know. I’ve known it ever since that day when we put her into her grave.”

Herold came between them imploringly. “My dear man--my dear fellow--what is the use of this wild talk? You two love each other. Unity gave her life for the two of you. If you two don’t come together, it’s all overwhelming, blasting irony. I couldn’t believe in God after it. It would be hellishly cynical. Stella, in God’s name, tell him that you are bound by Unity’s sacrifice--that you love him and will marry him and make his life happy!”

Stella, very pale, looked at John. “If you want me, I will marry you,” she said in a clear voice.

John waved her aside. “I will not take you, my dear,” said he.

Spurned sex winced involuntarily.

“If you have stopped caring for me--”

“I stopped caring? I? Merciful God, I’ve never loved you so much. But you love a better man. What’s the good of saying the same things over and over again? But I’ll tell you this, both of you, that if Unity had not given her life, and if I had been free, I should have fought for you and had you despite everything. That’s my accursed nature. But Unity has not died in vain, and it’s because of that child’s death, the beauty and heroism of it, that I’m able to stand here and tear my heart out and throw it away. Don’t make any mistake,”--he turned fiercely on Herold,--“it’s not I who am giving her up. It’s Unity.”

“Very well,” said Herold. “Let us put it at that. It’s your point of view. You also force me to speak. It would be grotesque to keep silence any longer. Yes, I do love her. She is the beginning and end of life to me. If she had lain on her back all her days, I should never have married another woman. There! You have it now.”

The two men’s eyes held each other for a space. Stellamaris looked at the pair with a fearful admiration. They were men. Herold she had divined and known long ago; this, on his part, was only the supreme fulfilment of promise. But John Risca, who had passed through the illusion and disillusion of her soul, stood before her in new strength, a great and moving figure.

At last John drew a deep breath, turned to Stellamaris very gently, and smiled.

“And you?”

The smile sent swift pain through her heart. She made a step or two, and fell sobbing on his breast.

“O Belovedest, I am sorry! You have guessed right. Forgive me!”

He caressed the bowed head tenderly for an instant, then releasing himself, he clapped his hand on Herold’s shoulder and shook it with rough affection.

“I’m going to bed,” said he. He moved to the door. There he paused to nod a good night; but at sight of them both looking sadly at him he walked back a couple of paces.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m at peace with myself for the first time for years. There’s lots of happiness in the world left.” He smiled again. “Enough for the three of us--and for Unity.”

He left them, and went to bed in the room which Stellamaris had furnished for him long ago, and fell into the sleep of the man who has found rest at last in the calm and certain knowledge of spiritual things. Unity had not died in vain. And Stellamaris, sitting once more by Herold’s side in the wide bay of the window, and talking with him in a hushed voice of the wondrous things that had come to pass, knew that John Risca had spoken a great truth. It had been God’s will that so should the terrible splendor of the world be made manifest.

Herold asked for the million-billionth time in the history of mankind:

“When did you first find that you loved me?”

She replied, perhaps more truly than most maidens:

“There was never a time when I didn’t love you. I mean--I don’t quite know what I mean,” she said confusedly. “You see, I’ve lived a strange life, dear,” she went on. “You seem to have been a part of me ever since I can remember what is worth remembering. You have always understood things that went on inside me almost before I could tell them to you. I always wanted you to explain foolishnesses that I couldn’t speak of to any one else.”

“That’s very beautiful,” Herold interrupted, “but love is a different matter. When did the real love come to you?”

“I think it was that morning in the garden when you almost whipped me,” said Stella. She started an inch or two away from him. “And I’m sure you knew it,” she said.

And he remembered, as he had often remembered in his great struggle, her eyes, turning from agates to diamonds and her words, “Do you love me like that?”

“Heaven knows, Stellamaris dear; I did not mean to betray myself.”

She laughed the enigmatic laugh of a woman’s contentment, and Herold was too wise to ask why.

They spoke of deepest things. “There is something I must tell you,” said he, “which up to now I have had to keep secret, and it is right that you should know.”

And he told her the story of Unity and himself--the revolver, their talk of the evil woman, their parting words, his crazed adventure through the sunny streets.

She listened, her body leaning forward, her hands clasped on her knee. When he had finished, she sat without change of attitude.

“You did that so that another man could marry the woman you loved. Unity did that so that the man she loved could marry another woman. John came in to-night to sacrifice himself and give us both happiness. The three of you have done terrible and splendid things. I am the only one of us four who has done nothing.”

Herold rose, took a nervous pace or two. What she said needed more than a lover’s sophistical reassurance. He could speak a thousand words of comfort; but he knew that her soul required a supreme answer, a clue to the dark labyrinth through which she had worked. What could he say? He looked through the window, and suddenly saw that which to him was an inspiration. He threw the folding-doors wide. It had stopped raining long ago, though neither had noticed.

“Come out on the terrace,” said he.

She followed him into the gusty air. The sea still roared resentfully at the late disturbance of its quiet. The southwest wind that had brought up the storm had driven the great rack of black cloud above the horizon, and there below the rack was a band of dark but cloudless sky, and in it one star hung serene. Herold pointed to it.

“What have you done, dear?” His voice broke in a catch of exultation, and his usually nimble wit failed to grasp the lunatic falsity of the analogy. “You have done what that has done--come through the storm pure and steadfast.”

“Not I, dear,” she said, “but my faith in the God we breathe.”

“No; you yourself.” He put his arm around her, and all his love spoke. “You. The living mystery of beauty that is you.” He whispered into her lips. “You--Stellamaris--Star of the Sea.”

THE END

THE END OF THE BIG JOB

HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT AND HUMAN NATURE ON THE CANAL ZONE,--INCLUDING A CONVERSATION WITH COLONEL GOETHALS

BY FARNHAM BISHOP

The chauffeur of the railroad-motor shook his head.

“The observation-platform’s been taken down, sir, and the track leading to it torn up. That part of the bank’s ready to go out any minute. You can get a good view of the cut, though, from the Y. M. C. A. Building.”

When, in 1906, Uncle Sam put up this building in Culebra, and officially christened it an “I. C. C. Club-house,” because it was the Government, and not the Y. M. C. A., that was paying the shot, he placed it at some little distance from the cut. But in August, 1912, the club-house was very near the cut,--nineteen inches nearer than its own concrete foundation-piers,--and if it had not been lifted and braced with heavy timbers, it would long ago have gone tobogganing down the bank. As I walked through the reading-room, it moved and creaked like a wicker basket with the shock of a heavy blast; but the other men in the room did not raise their eyes from their magazines. From the back porch I looked down into the Culebra Cut, a wider, deeper cut that had completely swallowed up the one I knew well in 1910. Then the fifty-odd giant steam-shovels had been scattered over the nine miles from Bas Obispo to Pedro Miguel; now I saw them concentrated in and about the deep gulch between Gold Hill and Contractor’s Hill for the last battle of the long campaign. From here to where the dike at Bas Obispo keeps out the rising waters of Gatun Lake they are taking up the construction tracks, and the rank jungle-grass grows thick on the bottom of the finished, empty canal.

Between Gold Hill, advance-guard of the Andes, and Contractor’s Hill, southernmost point of the Rockies, lies the deepest part of the cut, and the nearer the big steam-shovels dig down to grade, the harder it is to haul away their spoil. Double-engined and coupled together, the dirt trains climb the steep grade in pairs. First come two straining, spouting Moguls, then a string of loaded “Lidgerwood flats,” like a hill on wheels; then a third locomotive, a string of swaying, clanking “Oliver dumps,” their side-chains jingling like artillery-harness; and last a fourth locomotive, detached, which, with the air of an enthusiastic small boy, comes running up behind to help push. The marbled mass of steam and soft-coal smoke takes strange colors in the tropic sunlight, then shreds away, revealing a patch of vividly blue sky, a palm, and a lone steam-shovel eating away the top of a slide on the edge of the opposite bank.

Whenever a fresh slide begins to break down the bank of the Panama Canal, Colonel Goethals, like the Duchess in “Alice in Wonderland,” cries, “Off with its head!” Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of slides, both curable by decapitation. The first is a mass of soft clay, resting on a sloping ledge of rock, made slippery by seeping rain-water. When dug away at the bottom, the whole hillside begins to slip down, usually with the deliberation of a glacier, but often with the rush of an avalanche. The second kind of slide is caused by the collapse of a stratum of rock under the weight resting upon it. Some of the hard volcanic material in the cut, laboriously blasted out with dynamite, crumbles into dust on exposure to the air. This failure of the foundations causes a lateral pressure against the bottom of the cut, sometimes heaving it up fifteen or twenty feet. In either case, the remedy is to lighten the load on the top of the bank, often aggravated by the presence of an old French dump-heap. Now that the famous Cucaracha (Cockroach) Slide, that began to plague De Lesseps in 1885, and increased until forty-seven acres were in motion, is nearly, or quite, at rest, the two largest slides are the ones that have at last swallowed up the Culebra club-house, and the even larger landslide on the opposite bank. Between them, since 1907, they have involved the movement of nearly seven million cubic yards of earth and rock. A few days after my visit, a notice was posted at the door of the club-house, warning all who entered the building that they did so at their own risk, and workmen began to tear it down, and the bank where the observation-platform used to stand, a few hundred yards away, “went out” with a rush, to the tune of 900,000 cubic yards.

But Colonel Goethals is not worrying about the slides. He said to me:

“Altogether between nineteen and twenty million cubic yards will have been brought into the canal prism by slides before the completion of the work. About 5,915,000 cubic yards of this extra material was taken out during the year ending July, 1912, or more than thirty-three per cent. of the total excavation for that year. Less than 4,000,000 cubic yards of slides remain to be accounted for.”

“Have these slides proved the impossibility of a sea-level canal here?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” he replied.

“Will new slides continue to develop after the water has been turned into the cut?”

“Two things will tend to minimize that tendency,” he replied. “First, there will be no more shaking of the ground by blasting; second, the forty-five feet of water in the channel will exert a pressure on the banks of thirty-one tons per running foot of canal. Any earth brought into the cut then could be easily taken out by dredges.

“The last steam-shovel should be taken out of the cut, and all remaining rock broken up by blasting in the dry, by July 1, 1913. Then the dike at Bas Obispo will be blown up, and the water from Gatun Lake will flow into the cut and through Pedro Miguel Lock into Miraflores Lake. The dredge _Corozal_, now working at sea-level at the Pacific end of the canal, will then be brought up through the Miraflores and Pedro Miguel locks, and put to work in the cut.”

Prominent among the few ornaments of Colonel Goethals’s bare, barrack-like office is a framed photograph of the _Corozal_, the largest ladder-dredge in the world. Each bucket of her endless chain lifts two cubic yards at a time. She was built in Renfrew, Scotland, in 1911, by a firm that thirty years ago made several smaller dredges for the De Lesseps Company. After rusting for a quarter of a century in tropical tidal-swamps, most of these, floated and cleaned, are still doing good work. Their honest craftsmanship impelled the purchase of the _Corozal_. Virtually like all the floating equipment at the Pacific end of the canal, she was brought round South America under her own steam. Her name is that of the first railroad station out of Panama City, and, literally translated, means “Merry-go-round.”

“There will always remain a certain amount of dredging to be done in the two entrances, at Balboa and in Limon Bay,” the colonel continued.

“And to keep Gatun Lake clear of silt and wreckage brought down by the Chagres River?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “There will be several miles of dead water at the upper end of the lake above Bas Obispo, where it will settle before reaching the channel.”

“The canal will be informally opened, Colonel, in September, 1913?” I asked.

“I expect to put the first ship through then; and if one can go, any number can. The range-lights, buoys, and other aids to navigation will all be placed and in working order. Less than ten per cent. either of the total excavation or of the concrete-laying in the locks remains to be done. At the present rate of speed, both will be finished, and all the gates and machinery for the east locks installed by September, 1912.”

The locks of the Panama Canal are in two sets, side by side, like the two tracks of a railroad, so that ships can cross in both directions simultaneously. As at this point the Pacific lies almost due south of the Atlantic,--which is why it was called by the Spaniards the South Sea,--the east locks are those on the left, or South American, side of one going from the Caribbean to the Gulf of Panama.

“When will everything be finished and ready for the formal opening?” I asked.

“I cannot say for certain. If the steelwork and towing-locomotives are delivered when promised, the west gates will be finished by the end of 1914. To operate those on the Pacific side, a transmission-line must be built from the spillway power-plant at Gatun to Miraflores. In the meanwhile one set of gates can be operated by local power-houses. Eventually the power generated by the surplus water running through the spillway of the Gatun Dam will generate enough electricity to run all the lock machinery, the Panama Railroad, and the machine-shops at Balboa, besides illuminating the lighthouses, the employees’ quarters, and the search-lights of the coast defenses.”

“Will the coast defenses be ready for use as soon as the canal?” I asked.

“Yes, if Congress appropriates the money to bring down the guns. We’ll have the emplacements built, and everything else ready for them. Of course a strong garrison should be maintained here. The strength of the details guarding the different locks is a matter to be determined by the General Staff. There is no danger of a lock’s being disabled by a solitary spy with a bomb. All the essential machinery is in duplicate or triplicate.”

“Then the popular idea of the Gatun Dam’s being blown up by one man with a suitcaseful of dynamite is--”

“Absurd. The only way that an enemy could let the water out of Gatun Lake would be to blow up the gates of the spillway, and that would require a large number of men, with plenty of time and explosives.”

“Now that the Canal Bill has passed, Colonel, you can begin to organize the operating-force?”

“Yes,” he replied. “As only one thousand Americans will be needed, and there are six times that many here now in the construction-force, the permanent organization will be a picked body of experienced men. There will also be about fifteen hundred West Indian Negroes to serve as helpers in the machine-shops, pass hawsers, and clean up about the locks. The bulk of the operating-force will be quartered at Balboa, and the lock-tenders at Pedro Miguel and Gatun.”

This wheel was invented by Mr. Edward Schildhauer of the Isthmian Canal Commission. The wheel revolves horizontally and thrusts out from the side of each lock-wall a long steel arm that opens and closes one of the huge lock-gates. These gates are of the “miter” pattern, so called because, when closed, they make a blunt wedge pointing up-stream, like the slope of a bishop’s miter. Observe the curved and hollowed recesses in the lock-walls into which the open gates fold back, like the blades of a knife into the handle. There are, of course, two “bull-wheels”: one for each of the gates.]

“Have the lessons learned in building the canal brought about any more useful inventions, like the well-known track-shifting machine?” I asked.

“H-m. One of the cranemen has patented a trip for emptying the bucket of a steam-shovel by steam instead of by hand. We’re using it on all the large shovels. Then there is the new lock-gate machinery; you will find the inventor up-stairs in this building. Remember, if you write anything about it, you must give him full credit.”

That is the colonel’s way, to insist on fair treatment for every man under him. He is not only the boss, but the hero, the big brother, the father confessor, of every man on the job. Stories innumerable are told about him, and even rough sagas are sung in his praise.

Have they canned you on the run?
Tell the Colonel;
Tell the tale of what they’ve done
To the Colonel.

Is the commissary bad?
Tell the Colonel.
If you tell him, he’ll be glad,
Will the Colonel.

Pass your sorrows and your woes
To the Colonel;
He will understand, he knows,
Does the Colonel.[7]

Speak his name among a group of employees, and immediately each will begin to tell of his experience with “Uncle George.”

“I was sittin’ in the cab, waitin’ to pull a string of dirt cars out of the borrow-pit at Gatun, when who comes a-hikin’ along the track but the Old Man. ‘Can you give me a drink of water?’ he says, and I draws him one from the cooler on the engine. He takes a swallow and says, ‘This is pretty warm for ice-water.’

“‘Yes, sir,’ I says, ‘we’re supposed to have ten pounds a day to put in it, but we’re not gettin’ more’n one.’ The colonel just hands back the cup and walks away, but, say, next mornin’ I drew an iceberg.”

A second man broke in:

“Yes, and somebody else got stung for that little graft, you can bet your pants. Remember that foreman at Peter Magill [Orthodox pronunciation of Pedro Miguel] who made his gang of Gallegos come across every pay-day? They picked one of the bunch who could handle the English to go up to Culebra, for a hablar [talk] with Uncle George. Zing! Mr. Foreman’s job dropped out from under him, and he dropped through, and the job swung back, and he wasn’t on it. He’s out making roads now with the rest of the chain-gang.”

“The day after I hit the isthmus in 1907,” put in a third man, “I got a cablegram from home, saying my wife was dead. And they wouldn’t let me go back to look after my babies; turned me down cold when I asked for a passage north, and all I had was my job here, and pay-day a month away. I heard there was a new chief engineer at Culebra, and I put it up to him. The colonel he signed a paper, and said:

“‘I’ve had too many letters from wives in the States whose husbands are down here neglecting their families. I’m glad to meet one of the other kind. Show Mr. Smith this, and he’ll give you a passage. Bring your family down with you, and I’ll give you a married-quarters.’”

Colonel Goethals is no longer the handsome, smooth-faced boy officer in full-dress uniform, shown in the well-known photograph taken when he was “the new chief engineer.” His latest portrait, here published for the first time, shows how the heavy responsibilities of the last five years have left their mark on him. His is a splendidly virile face, strong, kindly, and vigorously intellectual. He is appropriately shown in citizen’s clothes, for, except on the most formal occasions, he never wears his uniform. It was with the greatest difficulty that he was persuaded to sit for this picture, and he absolutely refuses to let himself be photographed at work either in his office or in the field.

“No,” said “Old Bill” May, chief clerk and Cerberus of the outer office, “the colonel isn’t one of those fellows who keep the photographer waiting till they can have a lot of extra papers brought in and dumped all over the desk, so folks can see how busy they are. Nobody’s got a camera into his room yet, and I’d hate to be caught trying it. Maybe you think you’re going to get a snap-shot of him to-morrow when he takes you over the Gatun Dam; but you ain’t.”

COLONEL GOETHALS]

And Old Bill May was right. When the morning express from Panama City stopped at Culebra, Colonel Goethals swung nimbly aboard and greeted our party as follows:

“Good morning. I’m sorry, but I can’t go to Gatun with you to-day; there’s a dock gone out at Balboa. Colonel Sibert will show you over Gatun. Good morning, good morning!”

Through the car window we saw him spring into a trim little railroad-motor, which slid clanging and whistling through the crowd at the station, and was half a mile down the track to Balboa before our train had started again for Gatun.

We traveled a curiously zigzag path, now on the old line of the Panama Railroad, now on the new. Ever since the first canoe-load of Peruvian gold was floated down from Cruces to the sea, nearly four hundred years ago, the valley of the Chagres has been the pathway of the isthmus. The Panama Railroad of the 1850’s, the days of lignum-vitæ ties, wood-burning locomotives, and twenty per cent. dividends, followed the banks and killed the river trade. To-day the rapidly rising waters of Gatun Lake have driven the railroad to higher ground to the east between Gatun and Bas Obispo. From that point the new permanent way was to have been carried through the cut on a berm, or shelf, on the east bank, ten feet above the water’s edge. It was a picturesque plan, but was reluctantly abandoned because of the danger from slides. So that part of the relocation has been built with great labor through the hills to the east of the cut, and is now finished and in use for freight. Not, however, for passengers, for the existing towns in the central division are all on the wrong side of the cut. Our train left Panama City on the old line, switched to the new at Corozal, crossed the cut on a temporary trestle near Pedro Miguel, and ran through Culebra and Empire, where in five years the macadamized and electric-lighted streets will be covered with second-growth jungle, to the busy railroad town of Gorgona, where the lake water will soon be lapping over the floors of the machine-shops. Here a coal-burning locomotive--oil-burners are the rule for passenger-traffic on the Panama Railroad--was attached to the rear of the train, to the disgust of the tourists on the observation-platform of the parlor-car. The train then ran backward up the other arm of the Y, across the dike at Bas Obispo to the new steel bridge across the Chagres at Gamboa, not far below ancient Cruces.

The rest of the way to Gatun ran through country marked on the map as part of Gatun Lake, but covered to-day with virgin jungle. Only in the channel and the anchorage-basin above the locks has the bottom been cleared of vegetation; elsewhere the finished “lake” will be one tangle of deadwood. Now near at hand, now miles away in the valley, the yellow line against the dark green shows where the rising water is drowning out the jungle. In a remarkably short time the leaves and small branches drop off, leaving the dead trunks gray and bare. The cocoanut-palms hold out the longest. The railroad runs high above the lake, on the solidest kind of stone embankments, containing millions of cubic yards of rock from the Culebra Cut. Probably the best-built fifty miles of road-bed in the Western Hemisphere is the relocated Panama Railroad.

ONE OF THE OLD CANAL DREDGES BUILT BY THE SCOTCH, LEFT BY THE FRENCH, AND REPAIRED AND USED BY THE AMERICANS]

Neat little concrete lighthouses, rising incongruously out of the forest, mark the approach to Gatun. Here is the key-point of the canal. From the northwest corner of the veranda round Colonel Sibert’s office, the whole scheme of things leaps to the eye. Four miles to the north lies Limon Bay, with the Caribbean beyond, the long breakwater stretching out from Toro Point on the left, to make the open roadstead a safe harbor, and on the right the new docks of Cristobal, the American-owned port of Colon. What looks like an over-fed dreadnought guarding the entrance is the sea-going suction-dredge _Caribbean_ at work on the four miles of canal that run under the bay to deep water. The next four miles of all-but-finished sea-level canal, up which ships will sail to Gatun; the profile of the three great locks that will lift them eighty-five feet; the beginning of the broad lake, over which they will sail at that level to Bas Obispo and through the cut, and then down through Pedro Miguel and Miraflores locks to sea-level on the Pacific side, can here be seen and comprehended with a turn of the head. From east and west the hills that inclose the valley of the Chagres close in to the gap, little more than a mile wide, now filled by the Gatun Dam.

Colonel Goethals’s office is in this building.]

From a photograph taken on July 4, 1912.]

You must not think of the Gatun Dam as an ordinary dam, a high, thin wall holding back a body of water, but as an artificial continuation of the gently sloping hills it joins together. In cross-section it resembles the most obtuse of triangles. A cow could walk over it anywhere, and find fairly good pasturage by the way; for coarse, thick-stemmed grass springs up wherever the surface is left undisturbed for a few days. By the time the canal is opened, so quickly is bare earth overgrown in the tropics, those seeing the dam for the first time from the deck of a steamer will have the greatest difficulty telling where it begins and the hills end.

We rode in a railroad-motor along one of the several railroad tracks on the broad crest of the dam; its sides sloped down to a quarter of a mile away on each side. Halting the car about a hundred feet from the edge of the spillway, Colonel Sibert pointed directly down at the mass beneath our feet, and said:

“Eighty or so feet below us lies the site of old Gatun. Morgan and his buccaneers spent their first night there on their way up the Chagres to the sack of old Panama, and it was a famous stopping-place for travelers in the days of the Forty-niners. When we began work here in 1907 there was an island in the river, with a village of fifty thatched huts and a church on it. Now the village is over back of us, and big enough to need three separate fire companies; and the island’s gone, and the river’s gone, and there’s where the railroad used to run along its bank.”

The colonel pointed to where the tops of a few old telegraph-poles made a straight line across the surface of the lake.

“And the river, Colonel, where have you put that?” we asked.

“Here.” He led the way to the edge of the spillway, the concrete-lined artificial channel, larger than the original river-bed and hewn through a natural hill of living rock, that carries off the surplus water of Gatun Lake. Last rainy season a certain photographer took a snap-shot of the spillway from down-stream during a flood, and impudently sold it to a magazine as a picture of the finished canal, “with the water turned in!”

“Colonel, could a fish from the Caribbean swim up that mill-race and cross over to the Pacific?”

“I think so, and so does Colonel Goethals. The only question is, Could a saltwater fish live through the thirty-four miles of fresh water in the lakes and the cut?

“As fast as we want the water to back up against the big dam, we keep raising that semicircular concrete dam down there in the spillway. Those openings you see are being fitted with steel gates, and no matter how hard it may rain up in the hills, we’ll always have enough gates to open and let the water through without any danger of its washing over the crest. Now we’ll cross the bridge over the spillway to the other end of the dam, and then run back and go over the locks.”

The elaborate concrete-laying plant at Gatun, which cost over a million dollars to erect here in the wilderness, has nearly finished its mighty task. The tall steel towers, which stand in pairs on each side of the lock-pit and hold aloft the cableways along which traveling-cranes carry the skips of freshly mixed concrete to the forms and return them empty to the little electric cars that go hurrying back to the mixing-house for more, have been moved down to the lower end of the third and lowest lock. By the time this article appears in print they will probably have been taken down and sold for scrap.

The entrance and intersection of the American and French canals.]

A concrete and timber bulkhead, the nearest approach to an orthodox-looking dam a layman can find at Gatun, keeps the water of the sea-level canal out of the lock-chambers. Directly in front of it float three or four high-decked craft that look for all the world like old-time Mississippi River packets. All they seem to lack are a few roustabouts and a gilt trotting-horse between the tall smoke-stacks. As a matter of fact, they are dredges, with living-quarters for the crews. Across the channel behind them, shutting them off from the sea, is a solid-looking clay dike.

“Colonel,” we asked, “how did you put those boats into that mud-puddle,--fly them or jump them over?”

“The dipper-dredge cut the way in, and the suction-dredge closed it behind them. That dike keeps them from being disturbed by the rise and fall of the tide. A great part of the canal between here and Limon Bay was excavated in the dry by steam-shovels working behind dikes forty feet below sea-level; but that was in rock. The stuff these dredges are pumping out is prehistoric sea-bottom--soft, black ooze that runs like oil. A big slide of it started due north toward Limon Bay, swung round to the east, and then due south, went three quarters round the compass, and half-way up the lowest lock-pit. We had to force it out by building the permanent lock-walls right into it, section by section--shoved it out by sheer weight.”

“Is there anything like that under the Gatun Dam?” we asked.

“No, this mud is nearly three quarters of a mile north of it. The entire dam rests on the solidest kind of clay, and the locks are built on a ledge of sandstone, except the north approach wall. That will have to be built on piers driven down through the mud to bed-rock. The approach wall is the continuation of the dividing-wall between the two sets of locks, which projects into what we call the forebay, where ships must come to a stop and make fast to the electric locomotives that will tow them through the locks.

“These towing-locomotives,” continued Colonel Sibert, leading us to the top of the nearest lock-wall up a broad, well-proportioned stairway cast in one piece with the rest of the structure, “will be equipped with winches and slip-drums, so that they can tighten or slacken the hawsers, a flexibility that is going to save breaking a lot of line. Four locomotives will take charge of each large ship, two forward and two aft. When they reach those archways carrying the tracks from one level to another, one pair will take the weight of the ship, while the others will climb up to the level above by this rack-rail.”