Chapter I: Love of Woman

If meetings only lived up to their anticipations, life would be a succession of startling climaxes. It had been some months since Meade had seen Helen Illingworth. He had dreamed of meeting her every day and had pictured the meeting differently and more rapturously after every letter. When Abbott had received a telegram from Colonel Illingworth stating that he and his party, including his daughter, would arrive the next day, all the anticipations of months had been concentrated and Meade had imagined a romantic meeting in which the longings and desires of the period of separation would all be summed up in one dramatic moment. As a matter of fact the whole thing was casual and ordinary to the last degree. It always is.

In the first place, Dr. Severence, a retired physician, who was vice-president and financial man, and Curtiss, the chief engineer of the Bridge company, were hard upon Miss Illingworth's heels as she stepped down from the car to the station platform. He saw her, as it were, surrounded by prosaic men. None of these men was a possible rival. Each was old enough to be her father so he could not really be jealous of them except in so far as he was even jealous of the wind that kissed her cheek--at least that is the way he put it to himself. There was a vein of poetry in this engineer, as there is in every man who achieves in whatever profession, on whatever field of work he may adventure. Gradgrind does nothing great, he mounts to no heights, he wins nothing really worth the winning by his worship of the facts of life.

Meade had no time to indulge his disappointment. He was busy in the exchange of greetings. The woman he loved got the same welcome and the same handshake as her father and the other two men. The common-place conversation is scarcely worth recording. It was not until big Abbott, who had been belated by some sudden demand of work, came sweeping down the platform to engage the attention of the men that the anxious Meade had a moment with the girl herself.

Now Helen Illingworth had also been seeing visions, dreaming dreams and forecasting possibilities, so that she had been as disappointed as he. The only real satisfaction that either of them could take in the situation lay in the fact that the other was there. It was midsummer and the girl was dressed in some light filmy fabric which well became her radiant beauty. Meade could look at a bit of structural steel work and tell you all about it. All that he could have told you about the dress she wore, was that it was exquisitely appropriate, and presented an appearance of amazing simplicity for anyone who had the command of unlimited means for the adornment of her person. He could have figured out the cost of the most stupendous structure, but it never occurred to him that with a great price to a great artist Helen Illingworth had obtained that look of delightful simplicity. The gown he thought so modest and inexpensive, really represented the highest reach of the sartorial art as it is practiced by, and upon, fair womankind. He could not know that Miss Illingworth had spent æons of time and riches in proportion, with the assistance of the best dressmaker in New York, over this very gown, and what was more to the point, for this very purpose.

Her maid had lifted her eyebrows behind her mistress' back when she had been bidden to get out this dress for a visit to the wild and primitive section of the country in which the great International Bridge was being erected. The woman knew, from what she had heard, that there was nobody there except engineers, contractors, supervisors, and workmen, and why all this superb and costly finery should be wasted on the desert air she could not see. Even her father, who was ordinarily indifferent to what his daughter wore, noticed it and commented on it when she appeared.

"I've had the dress now for over a month," responded Helen in answer to his observation, "and I want to wear it once at least before it goes out of fashion."

It was not wasted on Meade, she decided, as she caught his rapturous glance; that is, the details were, but the effect produced was entirely satisfactory and quite what she had expected. She had never looked lovelier. She was not a fragile, ethereal woman; quite the reverse. That was one of ten thousand things Meade liked about her. She was modern and up-to-date in every good sense of the word. She could do all those athletic and practical things that modern young women can do and she could do them well. Was it riding, or swimming, or golfing, or driving a speed-boat or motor-car, she took them as an ordinary girl takes bridge or the latest fantastic dance.

Meade was intensely practical and efficient. He could do all of those things himself and many more and he liked to do them, and that is one reason why he had been attracted to her; yet not for that alone did he love her. On that soft summer afternoon she looked as subtly delicate as every man would at one time or another have the woman he loves appear, and as far removed from things strenuous as if in another world! Distance and absence had but intensified the man's passion. He awoke to a sudden and overwhelming realization that he had been a fool in that he had utterly failed even in his most ardent thought to appreciate the true beauty and rare quality of this wondrous woman.

A wise philosopher has pointed out that humanity may be looked at from three points of view. There is the real John, there is the John that John thinks John is, and there is the John the world thinks John is. Meade felt that he represented all three when he looked at Helen Illingworth. Amid the emotions which the sight of her inspired in him, as he answered mechanically the natural and ordinary questions put to him by the men of the party before Abbott came on the scene and relieved him of that necessity, came a swift feeling of despair. He was wearing the rough clothes, flannel shirt, khaki trousers, heavy shoes and leggings, which were his habitual use at work. Contrasted with her filmy and delicately colored fabric his well-worn olive-drab habiliments stood forth hideously. That is, he thought so, and the contrast somehow seemed typical of the difference between them as he considered her.

What was he to aspire to such loveliness? In what way did rough, rude, he measure up to such a graceful and dainty divinity? He was as humble as true lovers, of the male persuasion, usually are. She on the contrary was as arrogant as the opposite sex frequently is. The statement is made from the pre-matrimonial period! Yet, had he but known it, she was as pleased as he with the appearance of the beloved.

There was the careless insouciance of conscious power in the bearing of the engineer which differentiated him from most of the men with whom she had been thrown in contact during her life--the exceedingly well-trained, the exceedingly well-groomed young manhood of the present day. She recalled that even when her friends went for a hard day in the woods from the big house on the mountain above Martlet they always seemed to be clothed in outing togs immaculately new. Obviously the hand of little use with its daintier touch, was not that appertaining to Meade. He was made for mastery and for manful work, even as she for, in that dress, softness and sweet attractive grace. He looked strength and the fact that he was power in submission, and strength in subordination, and so obviously hers to command, gave her a delicate thrill; the same sort of thrill the great engine-driver feels when he lays his hand on the throttle. It is not only Budge and Toddy who love to see the wheels go 'round. And everybody wants to set them in motion. She looked covertly upon him as a lion-draped Omphale might have looked at Hercules, even though Meade bore no distaff in his hand.

The International Bridge was the biggest thing of the kind the Martlet Company or any other American structural plant had ever undertaken. It had been a constant topic of conversation wherever her father was. She had heard all about it and although, strictly speaking, the bridge was the work of Meade, Senior, yet she always identified it with Meade, Junior. There was a feeling in her mind that it was her bridge and that, through him, she commanded it. She was a supremely assured and entirely confident young lady, yet as the sheer and filmy mousseline-de-soie with its garniture of lace even more delicate was driven by the wind against the rough nondescript garment of the man by her side she experienced a passing sense of uneasiness, such as one might conceive the butterfly would feel in the presence of a steam hammer. Yet Helen Illingworth was not a butterfly and no more was Bertram Meade a steam hammer, at least not to her.

They were just two young people desperately in love, neither quite sure of the other, at least no assurance had been given or asked, and although the man was thirty and the woman twenty-four they loved just as if their passions had been born in the first unthinking hours of youth and maidenhood.

Experience and observation have established the fact that the whorls on the thumbs of human hands differ in tracery as one star differeth from another star in glory, and that so far as humanity can draw a general inference without having observed all the instances, no thumb is like any other thumb that has ever complemented fingers since Adam first inspected his pickers and stealers. The Power that can stamp this infinite variety in the human skin has seen to it that there are no duplications in human temperaments. Infinite is the variety of woman while women collectively are as various as that infinity raised to the _n_th power. The love story of every man and woman differs in some particular from that of every other man and woman. Again a sweeping deduction from perhaps inadequate observation. Yet men who have loved many have observed the variation in specific and particular instances and such single-hearted experiences as have been set down for the ruthless scrutiny of the ethic philosopher have borne out this contention.

But if it be true, as it is generally admitted, that love-making is individual and different, in one particular various woman changeth not. At sweet-and-forty given the conditions and the man she will love just as she might have--or did--at sweet-and-twenty. It well may be, God knows, that she will love the same way at sweet-and-sixty. Which is to say that although both the young people in this veracious romance had passed the period of--shall we say the Sweet Evelina age?--they were both affected just exactly the way they would have been affected if she had been eighteen and he twenty-one.

They were as awkward and constrained when left to themselves as if one had not been all over the world on man's jobs for a decade and the other had not queened it among the nicest girls of the land for half as many years. And with thoughts burning, passionate, and words embarrassingly torrential at hand to give them utterance they only spoke commonplaces!

"How is the bridge getting along?" asked the girl, repeating her father's words of a few minutes before, as these two fell behind the others marching down the long platform, while the maid standing by the private car with the porter looked curiously after the moving group and wondered if that grey-green, long-legged, young man was the reason for the New York gown!

"It's doing splendidly," was the answer, and even with his heart full of the girl by his side whom he longed to clasp in his arms but did not even dare touch the hem of her garment, some little enthusiasm came into his voice. "It is the greatest bridge that was ever erected," he said.

"How you love it," said the girl.

Did Meade love the bridge? Ah, there could be no doubt as to that.

He had studied its growth hour by hour. As the great steel web rose grandly from the pier under the hands of the busy workmen and the arms of the great traveler, his heart expanded with it. He took pride in it that increased as panel succeeded panel. He had followed it with even more heart-consuming interest and anxiety when they began to push the suspended span across the river on the outer end of the completed cantilever, toward its fellow rising on the other side. Its obsession of his soul was so strong and so complete, that he could scarcely tear himself away from it to do necessary work at his desk.

He lingered about it when the rest of the work-a-day world which was concerned with it had withdrawn to rest. Frequently late in the night he had arisen and had left the sheet-iron shack he occupied near the work (for the topography of the land and the course of the river had determined the location of the bridge far from any town), and had stood staring, fascinated, by its dim mysterious outline, high upraised against the stars, until its details were lost in the blackness overhead. Or were it moonlight, he had gazed bewitched by the great web of steel, all its mighty tracery delicately silvered, faintly outlined, lace-like, lofty, lifted high into the heavens.

He fell into a little reverie for a brief moment from which she recalled him.

"Well?" she asked.

Was there a little wistful, jealous note in her voice? He looked at her quickly as one essays a swift glance at the sun and then averted his eyes, and from the same cause. She blinded him. He really felt that he could not look at her continuously without declaring his passion before the whole world. There was much of the feudal champion in him. The civil engineer is the last survivor of the type in this modern and prosaic work-a-day world anyway. Nothing would have pleased him better than to have seized her before everybody, then and there, crushing that filmy gown against his rougher clothing, and to have borne her triumphantly away. Knight errant or cave man? There are points of similarity between them of which the world is perhaps not aware. He was ready to fill both roles, and counted himself unlucky in that there were no dragons present, although on occasion Colonel Illingworth might have essayed that part with some success.

"Yes, naturally," he found himself saying in a conventional tone of voice, "it means a great deal to me. My father----"

"Oh, your father," she began indifferently, although she knew and liked the great engineer.

"It is his crowning work and----"

"Your beginning."

"It is not in me, or in any engineer, to begin where my father left off," he said, "but in some way it is a beginning for me. What little I have done heretofore----"

"Little?"

"Yes. It isn't really very much. It seems more than it is. Anybody could have done it."

"Absurd."

"It doesn't amount to very much to me at least," he went on, smiling at her interruption, but pleased at it. "But this will count a great deal, because through father's kindness I had some hand----

"I believe you did it all," interrupted the girl.

He broke into sudden laughter and his merriment had that boyish ring she liked. He seemed to think that was a sufficient answer to that statement, for he went on quickly.

"How long shall you stay?"

And in spite of himself he could not keep his anxiety out of his voice.

"I think father's going on to the city some time tomorrow--probably in the morning."

Meade's face fell.

"So soon as that?"

"I will try to persuade him to stay longer. I've seen lots of bridges built but never one like the International, and I should enjoy standing by and watching you work."

"I don't do the work. Abbott does that, and the men, of course."

"Your work is the work that makes possible and profitable the labor of the others," she persevered. "You plan, you lead, the rest only follow. By the way, father told me to ask you and Mr. Abbott to dine with us tonight in the car."

Meade's mood changed into positive gloom.

"I can't," he said dejectedly.

"Have you some other engagement? Are you dining with some other people more to your fancy?"

"You know there is no one here but Abbott, the foremen, and the workmen."

"Why not, then?"

"I haven't any clothes, neither has Abbott. We left our dress suits behind us when we came into the wilderness to work."

"Oh," she laughed. "What difference does that make? Come just as you are. It will be a relief. I like you that way. I get so tired of black and white," she went on quickly to prevent him from taking advantage of her incautious admission.

Happiness came back to his soul at that. He had a half-formed notion of perpetually preserving these garments that she liked and hanging them up in his ancestral hall, as men did suits of armor which they had proved in strife, to which their descendants could point with pride. Just an old suit of olive drab which she liked the love of woman can dignify anything in the mind of the man she loves.

The half-formed project died, however: for one thing he had no ancestral halls.

"Really," he found himself saying, "it's awfully good of you, but I don't think I should with no garments suited to the occasion. I tell you what I'll do. I'll motor over to the town"--it lay some twenty-five or thirty miles away--"and get myself a proper outfit."

"It will take so long and I shall be here only until tomorrow," she said softly.

"Hang the clothes," said the man, radiant once more in that admission, "since you will allow it I will come with what I can rake up. But you'll have to tell me which fork to use and give me expert advice in those customs of polite society which I have almost forgotten out here in the wilderness."

"I'll do my best," returned the other. "And after dinner and you have had your smoke with the men, we will go down and look at the bridge by moonlight."

"And what will you do meanwhile if I should smoke with the men?"

"I will wait," said the woman with mock humility. "Women always wait while men smoke unless they smoke themselves, don't they?"

"And you have not learned that?"

"Not yet. It makes me feel dreadfully old-fashioned sometimes, but I have never even tried a cigarette. I don't wish to."

"I love----" he began, and then stopped amazed at his own hardihood, fearful of the possible consequences of his almost betrayal.

"You what?" she asked daringly, with another swift glance as swiftly withdrawn.

"I--I like women who do not smoke," he answered lamely, which was not at all what he intended to say, but which was nevertheless an approval of her course. "But if you think that with the possibility of but a few hours in your society I am going to sit around and smoke with your father or Abbott or Severence or anybody on earth you are sadly mistaken. I can smoke with men any time I wish, but I can only talk to you once in a lifetime."

"It isn't six months since you were at our house."

"Six months! It's a thousand years," he went on, "and I'm going to take you out on the bridge after dinner. It's great at any time. It's the most magnificent sight on earth even now, but in the moonlight--there it is now," he pointed as the little group walked past the station which had hid the view and the great structure suddenly was revealed to them.

Unconsciously the engineer used the neuter pronoun for the great structure which for all its sexlessness had still a being and a life.

It is the habit of man to imbue with personality the thing inanimate that he loves. Furthermore as love naturally is associated in the masculine mind with the opposite sex, he generally describes that genderless thing without life which is nearest his heart as "she." Witness the sailor and the ship, the railroader and the train, the chauffeur and the car. The bridge engineer is the exception to the rule. The great structures which he flings from pier to pier, which he stretches from bank to bank, which lift themselves above rivers and mountain gorges and arms of the sea, are always neuter. "It" is the proper pronoun.

The four men ahead had stopped and stood silent. There was something awe-inspiring and tremendous about the great, black, out-reaching, far-extending arms of steel. The first sight of it always gave the beholder a little shock. It was so huge, so massive, so grandly majestic, and withal so airy seen against the impressive background of deep gorge and palisaded wall and far-off mountains. So ether-borne was it in its perfect proportion that even dull and stupid people--and none of these were that--felt its overpowering presence. Meade and the girl stopped, too. After one glance at the bridge she looked at him. And that was typical. For the first time he was not at the moment aware of, or immediately responsive to, her glance. And that too was typical. She noted this with a pang of jealousy.

"You love the bridge," she said softly.

He straightened up and threw his head back and looked at her.

"I thought so," he said simply,--"until today, but now"--he stopped again.

"But now?" she asked.

"I have just learned what love really is and the lesson has not been taught me by the bridge," he answered directly.