Chapter XIV: For the Honor of the Son

Bertram Meade, Senior, had not left the office during the whole long afternoon. The stunning force of his son's utterly unexpected announcement had wrecked the father as surely as the defective member would wreck the bridge. The boy might delude himself with the youthful hope that something could be done to save it, but the old man knew that the bridge was doomed and he realized that his own ruin in professional fame would follow its downfall.

He sat alone in his office quietly waiting for the end, not as one awaiting a death sentence, but rather as one who had been tried, convicted, and sentenced might await the moment of execution. As to the drowning, in the brief interval preceding the final asphyxia, life unrolls in rapid review, so pictures of the past took form and shape in his mind. He recalled many failures. No success is uninterrupted and unbroken. The little stones of progress are planted on the recurrent hills of mistake. It is through constant blundering that we arrive. "Roses, roses all the way" generally ends in the gibbet. He had learned to achieve by failing as everybody else learns. But failures and mistakes, which were pardonable in the beginning of his career, could not be condoned now; those should have taught him. He realized too late that his later achievement had begot in him a kind of conviction of omniscience, a belief in his own infallibility, bad for a man. His pride had gone before, hard upon approached the fall. He had been so sure of himself that even when the possibility that he might be mistaken had been pointed out and even argued, he had laughed it to scorn. His son's arguments he had held lightly on account of his youth and comparative inexperience--to his sorrow he realized it, too late.

Again came that strange feeling of pride, the only thing which could in any way alleviate his misery or lighten his despair. It was his own son who had pointed out the possible defect. Youth more often than not disregards the counsel of age. In this case age had made light of the warnings of youth. It was a strange reversal he thought, grimly recognizing a touch of sardonic and terrible humor in the situation.

Of course in that swift survey of his career which he was making, he counted success after success, cumulating in magnitude and greatness. Not easily, not lightly, had he risen to the chief place in his profession. Verily his path to the stars had been through difficulties, as well as failure, and yet he recognized bitterly that no one would ever think of his success again in the face of this one awful failure. Certain words that he had read in his Bible came to him and seemed strangely applicable, though here was no question of moral guilt.

"_When the righteous turneth away from his righteousness and committeth iniquity--shall he live? All his righteousness that he hath done shall not be mentioned; in his trespass that he hath trespassed and in his sin that he hath sinned, in them shall he die._"

He had always rather felt some injustice in the proposition despite its divine sanction. He had questioned it. He did not question it now. He knew that when men looked at the finest structure due to his cunning devising and scientific planning they would say:

"Yes, that's one of Meade's designs. I wonder how long it will stand. You know he was responsible for the International."

In his case the end would not crown the work. It would destroy it. He would be remembered as one confounded like the builders of Babel, the tower by which men overpassed the limit divine.

"Whom the gods destroy they first make mad." Well, he had been mad enough. If he had only listened to the boy. And now there was nothing he could do but wait. Yes, as the long hours passed and the sun declined, and the evening approached, there suddenly flashed upon him that there was still something he could do. He had experienced some strange physical sensations during that afternoon, unease in his breast, some sharp pains about his heart. What did it mean? Was it mental or physical? He forgot them for the moment in the idea that had come to him.

When the bridge fell he would avow the whole responsibility, take all the blame. Fortunately for his plans his son had reduced to writing his views on the compression members, which had almost taken the form of protest, and this letter had been handed to his father. His first mind had been to tear it up after he had read it and had overborne the objections contained therein, but on second thought he had carefully filed it away with the original drawings. It was, of course, in the younger Meade's own handwriting.

He went to his private safe, unlocked it,--and that he was a long time over the combination might have been indicative of his state, but he thought of the delay with nothing but vexation--and brought out the plans. He had intended upon the completion of the bridge to give the letter back to the young man. He had keenly enjoyed by anticipation his prospective little triumph when time had proved the father right, the son wrong. He opened the drawings and found the letter attached to the sheet of drawings. He put back the other drawings and closed the safe without locking it. Then he went back to the desk and considered the document. There were the calculations of the younger Meade. He was too old and tired to verify them all and there was no need. The bridge itself was doing that.

But he read the letter over, and in the illumination of the event he wondered dumbly how he could have failed to see the clearness, the cogency of the arguments, the finality of the conclusions, even without the careful computations he could not now follow. He had been blind, mad. He laid the paper down on his desk and put his hand to his heart. Yes, that pang must be mental.

We look before and after. Some super-men, perhaps, see more at the first glance than at the second, but most men, even the great, comprehend more largely in the afterlook. These papers, when they were published, with his own comment or admission, would rehabilitate the younger Meade. They would do more to confirm his own damnation because it would appear from them that he had been unable even to see the truth when it was presented to him. Well, he would be condemned so completely anyway that any addition, or subtraction for that matter, would scarcely alter the state of affairs.

Of course he would submit those papers to the public at once. Was there anything else he could do? Yes. He sat down at the desk and drew a sheet of paper before him and began to write. Slowly, tremblingly, he persevered, carefully weighing his words before he traced them on the paper. He had not written very long before the door of the outer office opened and he heard the sound of soft footsteps entering the room. He recognized the newcomer. It was old Shurtliff, a man who had been his private secretary and confidential clerk for many years. He stopped writing and called to him.

To a wonderful capacity for divining his employer's mind and completing his often brief and unfinished sentences by an intuition which was almost uncanny, Shurtliff added a quietness of manner that would have been annoying to some men, but which was most admirably complementary to the brisk, brusque, hurried, energetic habit of his employer and friend, who was all action, who could never draw a plan even or make a design without leaving it at frequent intervals to walk up and down the room or to throw up his arms, to get motion and action into life.

Shurtliff was an old bachelor, gray, thin, tall, reticent. He had but one passion--Meade, Senior; but one glory--the reputation of the great engineer. Yes, and as there is no great passion without jealousy, Shurtliff was filled with womanly jealousy of Bertram Meade because his father loved him and was proud of him. Shurtliff knew all about the private affairs of the two engineers, father and son. He knew all about the protest of the younger Meade. The father had told him just what he intended to do with it.

Shurtliff's life was bound up in the office. Even holidays and Sundays found him there for a part of the time at least. He might not have anything at all to do, indeed his work had been growing lighter as the older Meade had gradually withdrawn himself from active practice, but the old secretary was only happy there. He could breathe more freely and think more pleasantly and live more contentedly in the office than anywhere else. He had few friends. None at all who weighed in the balance with the older Meade.

Shurtliff might have been a great man if left to himself or forced to act for himself. But pursuing a great passion so long as he had he had merged himself in the more aggressive personality of his employer and friend. He had received a good engineering education, but had got into trouble over a failure, a rather bad mistake in his early career, too big to be rectified, to be forgiven, or condoned. The older Meade had taken him up, had been kind to him, had offered to try to put him on his feet again, but Shurtliff had grown to love the temporary work in which he had been engaged and he had no wish for anything else.

His big failure had increased his natural timidity, so he stayed on. He had become a part of the old man's life. As years went by the secretary came to realize that he could never be anything else. The ambitions of youth were abandoned. He no longer dreamed dreams or saw visions. Well, why not? He was absolutely alone in the world. Meade had dealt generously with his humble coadjutor; Shurtliff reasoned, perhaps, that he had as much from life as was coming to him; his church, his modest club, the charities and benefactions he loved to indulge in, assurance for his old age, and Meade himself. What could such a man as he ask more?

It has been said that he was jealous of the younger Meade; not meanly, not unpleasantly jealous, more resentful perhaps at the relative amount of affection the god of his idolatry bestowed upon him. He knew that he had to take second place and that he ought to take second place, and that if he failed to do so it would have been a reflection upon the character of the man whose personality and fame were dearer to him than anything else. Yet he did not enjoy that position.

Young Meade had never been able to get very far into the personality of Shurtliff, but he liked him and respected him. He realized the man's devotion to his father and he understood and admired him. Aside from that jealousy the old man could not but like the young one. He was too like his father for Shurtliff to dislike him. The secretary wished him well, he wanted to see him a great engineer. Of course he could never be the engineer that his father was. That would not be in the power of man. But still, even if he never attained that height, he could yet rise very high. Shurtliff would not admit that there was anything on earth to equal Meade, Senior.

In his dry, quiet way he had laughed with the older man over the presumption in the younger man's protest and argument. Oh, not in the presence of the younger man of course, but he had thoroughly enjoyed it. He was waiting for the time to come for the return of the protest. Meade, Senior, who had accepted all this devotion without hesitation and perhaps without fully understanding it, had told him that as he had heard the protest and argument he should be present when it was returned. Shurtliff's own engineering skill was not sufficient, since it had only been kept up by association as a secretary to the elder man, not in active practice, to enable him to pass judgment on the point himself.

The secretary was greatly surprised that afternoon as he stopped beside his own desk in his little private office, partitioned from the outer room, to hear his name called from the inner office. He recognized his employer's voice, of course, yet there was a strange note in it which somehow gave him a sense of uneasiness. He went into the room at once and stopped aghast.

"Good God, Mr. Meade!" he exclaimed.

Ordinarily he was the quietest and most undemonstrative of men. There was something soft and subtle about his movements. An exclamation of that kind had hardly escaped him in the thirty years of their association. He checked himself instantly, but Meade, Senior, understood that something of his own mental turmoil, the agony inward and spiritual, must have appeared in the outward and visible. He did not doubt his face told the story. The completeness of the revelation and the terrible nature of the story he could not guess. The day before Shurtliff had left Meade a hale, hearty, vigorous, somewhat ruddy man. Now he found his employer old, white, trembling, stricken. Meade looked at Shurtliff with a lack-luster eye and with a face that was dead while it was yet alive.

"Mr. Meade," began the secretary a second time, "what is the matter?"

"The International Bridge," answered the other, and the secretary noticed the strangeness of his voice more and more.

"Yes, sir, what about it?"

"It's about to collapse. Perhaps it has failed already."

"Collapse? Impossible!"

Meade passed his hand over his brow and then brought it down heavily on the desk.

"As we sit here, maybe, it is falling," he added somberly in a sort of dull, impersonal way.

Into the mind of the secretary came a foolish old line: "London bridge is falling down, falling down!" He must be mad or Meade must be mad.

"I can't believe it, sir. Why?"

"There's a deflection in one of the lower chord members of one and three-quarters inches. It's bound to collapse. The boy was right, Shurtliff," explained Meade.

"That can't be, sir," cried out the secretary with startling energy.

He would not allow even the idol itself to say that its feet were of clay.

"It can and is. He was right and I was wrong. I am ruined."

"Don't say that, sir. You have never failed in anything. There must be some means."

"Shurtliff, you ought to know there is no power on earth could save that member. It's only a question of time when it will fail."

"But young Mr. Meade?"

"He telegraphed me last night--this morning. I didn't get the wire. He couldn't make telephone connections, so he came down on the night train. Abbott refuses to take the men off the bridge unless he gets orders from Martlet. We tried to get in touch with them. At last he went down himself. I am expecting a wire every minute. If the bridge will only stand until quitting time the men will all be off, and there won't be any lives lost, but if not----"

The secretary leaned back against the door-jamb, put his hand over his face, and shook like a leaf. The old man eyed him.

"Don't take it so hard," he said. "It's not your fault, you know."

"Mr. Meade," burst out the other man, "you don't know what it means to me. A failure myself, I have gloried in you. I--you have been everything to me, sir. I can't stand it."

"I know," said Meade kindly. He rose and walked over to the man, laid his hand on his shoulder, took his other hand in his own. "It hurts more, perhaps, to lose your confidence in me than it would to lose the confidence of the world."

"I haven't lost any confidence, sir. We all make mistakes. I made one, you know, and you took me up."

"It's too late for anybody to take me up. Men can't make mistakes at my age. No more of that. We have still one thing to do."

"And what is that, sir?"

"Set the boy right before the world."

"And ruin yourself?"

"Of course, the truth is what ruins me."

"But if I were your son, sir," said the secretary, "rather than see you ruined I would take the blame on myself. He can live it down."

"But he is not to blame. On the contrary he was right, and I was wrong. Here, Shurtliff, is his own letter. You know it, you saw him give it to me. You heard the conversation and I have written out a little account explaining it, stating that I made light of his protests, acknowledging that he was right and I was wrong, taking the whole blame upon myself. He will be back here tonight I am sure. I intended to give it to him."

"Oh, don't do that, Mr. Meade."

"You have no son of your own. You don't know what you ask."

"Let the boy bear it," urged Shurtliff desperately. "By my long service to you, I beg----"

The telephone bell rang.

"The Bridge!" clamored the insistent bell.

The two old men stared at the instrument. It was the weaker who acted, in obedience to a sign from the engineer. Staggering almost like a drunken man, Shurtliff left his place by the door and passing his companion, whose turn it was to shrink back against the wall, he reached his thin hand out and lifted up the telephone, its bell vibrating it seemed with angry, venomous persistence through the quiet room.

"It's a telegram," he whispered. "Yes, this is Mr. Meade's private secretary. Go on," he answered into the mouthpiece of the telephone.

There was another moment of ghastly silence while he took the message. It was typical of Shurtliff's character that in spite of the horrible agitation that filled him, he put the instrument down carefully on the desk, methodically hanging up the receiver before he turned to face the other man. He spoke deprecatingly. No woman could exceed the tenderness he managed to infuse into his ordinarily dry, emotionless voice.

"The bridge is in the river, sir."

"Of course, any more?"

"Abbott--and one hundred and fifty men with it."

"Oh, my God!" said the old man.

He staggered forward. Shurtliff caught him and helped him down into the big chair before the desk. The news had been discounted in his mind, still some kind of hope had lingered there. Now it was over.

"We must wire Martlet," he gasped out.

"The telegraph office said the message was addressed to you and Martlet, so they have got the news, sir."

"It won't be too late for the last editions of the evening papers, either," said the old man. "Shurtliff, I was going to give these documents to the boy when he got back, but I want them to appear simultaneously with the news of the failure of the bridge. Wait." He seized the pen and signed his name to the brief letter of exculpation.

The writing in the body of the document was weak and feeble, the signature was strong and bold. He gathered the papers up loosely.

"Here," he said, "I want you to take them to a newspaper--the _Gazette_--that will be certain to issue an extra if it is too late for the last edition. I want this letter of his with mine to go side by side with the news. There must not be a moment of uncertainty about it."

"Mr. Meade, for God's sake----"

"Don't stop to argue with me now. Take a taxi and get there as quickly as you can. You are carrying my honor, and my son's reputation. Go."

The old man spoke sharply--imperiously--in such a tone as he rarely used to the other. White as death himself, and greatly shaken, Shurtliff took the papers, folded them up methodically, and hunted for an envelope.

"Don't stay for anything, Shurtliff," repeated Meade, "but go quickly. Stay at the _Gazette_ office until the extra comes out. Bring me one. I'll wait here for you."

Shurtliff did not dare to say anything further. Although thousands of protests rushed to his lips he did not give them utterance. As if it had been an ordinary commission he was charged to execute, he turned and walked out of the room. He paused as he reached the door and looked back. The old engineer sat before his desk, the pen still in his right hand, his left hand clenched and extended across the desk. He sat erect. Something of the dignity and the pride and strength and firmness of the days before had come back to him. He smiled faintly. His old friend closed the door behind him and departed.