Chapter XII: The Failure

In spite of himself and his confidence in the bridge, and every look at the huge trusses rising from the massive piers and extending their long arms out to meet their sister trusses beginning to rise on the other side, re-enforced that confidence, Abbott felt a little uneasy the next morning. At bottom he had more respect for Meade's technical knowledge than he had displayed or even admitted to himself. The younger engineer's terrified alarm, his urgent pleading, his utter forgetfulness of the amenities that usually prevailed between them, his frantic but futile efforts to telephone, of which the operator told Abbott in the morning, his hurried departure to New York, were, to say the least, somewhat disquieting, much more so than he was fain to admit to himself.

Although it involved a hard and somewhat dangerous climb downward and took upwards of a half-hour of his valuable time, the first thing the erecting engineer did in the morning was to go down to the pier head and make a thorough and careful examination of the buckled member. C-10-R was the first great member of the right-hand truss, as you crossed the bridge, that sprang from the steel shoe and reached out over the water. It was, of course, a part of the great lower chord of the huge diamond-shaped truss, which, with its parallel sixty feet away on the other side of the bridge and its two opposites across the river, supported the whole structure. If anything were wrong, seriously, irreparably wrong, with the member and it gave way, the whole truss would go. The other truss would inevitably follow suit, and the cantilever would immediately collapse. Abbott realized that, of course, as he climbed carefully down to the pier head and stood on the shoe.

Now the member was composed of four steel webs, each one made up of several plates of steel riveted together to form one huge plate. These four parallel webs were bound into one member and held rigid by steel lacings, which criss-crossed above and below the edges of the four webs. These steel lacings were angle bars riveted to the several webs and were also riveted through plates where they crossed, and finally were fastened to the edges of the webs. It was this massive and imposing piece of structural steel work which had got a little out of line, and which Abbott, perturbed in spite of himself, had come down to inspect, to see if there were any real ground for Meade's excitement and alarm.

It is wonderful how well-trained our physical senses may become. The final perfections of curvature in a great lens are the results of refinements of the sense of touch in the manufacturer's hands. So much had long experience taught Abbott that, as he stood by the member and surveyed it throughout its length, he could easily see that it had buckled, although the deviation was so slight, about two inches at its maximum in sixty feet. He brought with him a line and, with infinite care and pains, he drew it taut across the slight concavity like a bow-string. He had estimated the camber, or the distance between the center of the bow and the string, at one and a half inches. As he made more careful measurements, he discovered that it was slightly over one and three-quarter inches. Did this denote an increase? Abbott thought not. The difference simply lay between an estimate, however careful, and the actual measurements.

An inch and three-quarters in seven hundred and twenty was scarcely noticeable, not noticeable at all to the untrained eye, unless actually squinting along the line, and it did not seem very much to Abbott, standing on the pier head and looking up through the network of struts and bracing and girders. As he stood there feeling himself an insignificant figure amid this great interwoven mass of steel, again the sense of its strength and stability came to him overpoweringly, so much so that he laughed aloud in a rather grim fashion at the unwonted nervousness which had been induced in his mind by Meade's words and actions.

He would have been content to have left the pier head and have climbed back to the floor of the bridge, but he was a conscientious man, so he pursued his investigations further. He climbed up on top of the member, which was easy enough by means of the criss-crossed lacing, and carefully inspected that lacing. He did not, of course, look at every one of the bars of steel that bound together the giant webs that made up the member, but he gave a very careful and minute scrutiny to the lacings at the center of the concavity, or sidewise spring from the right line.

He noticed, by getting down on his face and surveying the lacing bars closely, a number of fine hair-line cracks in the paint, surface traceries apparently, running here and there from the rivet holes. The rivets themselves had rather a strained look. Some of the outer rivets seemed slightly loose, where before they must have been tight, for the members, like all other parts of the bridge, had been carefully inspected at the shop and any looseness of the rivets would certainly have been noticed there. But, at the time these discoveries were made, Abbott's obsession as to the strength of the bridge had grown stronger. Lining it out, crawling over it, feeling its rigidity, he decided that these evident strains were to be expected. Of course the lacings that held the webs together would have to take up a terrific stress. They had been designed for that purpose.

The best engineer had made the design and now the best erector found no radical fault with it. The other members of the truss were still in line. Abbott clambered over to the next one and examined some of the lacings there. He found a few of those hair-line paint cracks; not quite so many, but still some. He had brought with him a small hammer and he struck the lacing here and there, straining his ear to see if he could discover any difference in resonance between those at this point, at which the greater stress was being brought, because of the curvature, and others in other places. There was a difference, but it would have taken a finer ear than Abbott's, somewhat deafened by the constant noise of the pneumatic riveters, to realize the danger in the slight increase in sharpness of the resonance of the lacings that were most strained. Largely because he did not find anything very glaring, and because he wanted to believe what he believed, the chief of construction left the pier head and clambered up to the floor with more satisfaction in his heart than his somewhat surprising anticipation, which had so unwillingly grown under the stimulus of Meade's persistence, had led him to expect.

The whistle was just blowing for the commencement of work when he got back to the bridge floor. He could not but reflect, as the men came swarming along the tracks to begin their day's work, that the responsibility for their lives lay with him. Well, Abbott was a big man in his way, he had assumed responsibilities before and was perfectly willing to do so again, both for men and bridge. The workmen at least had no suspicions or premonitions of disaster.

Wilchings, the chief erecting foreman, knew about the camber. It had not bothered him. As he approached the two exchanged greetings.

"You're out early, Mr. Abbott," said Wilchings.

"Yes, I've been down to examine C-10-R."

Wilchings laughed.

"That little spring is nothing." He looked over the track and through the maze of bracing at the member. "If we had a pier somewhere we could hold up the earth with that strut. You didn't find out anything, did you?"

"Not a thing except some hair-line cracks in the paint around the rivets."

"You'll often find those where there's a heavy load to take up. This bridge will stand long after you and I and every man on it has quit work for good."

Now Wilchings was a man of experience and ability, and if Abbott had needed any confirmation of his opinion this careless expression would have served. He did send him across the river to examine the half-completed cantilever on the other bank, upon which work had been suspended, awaiting shipments of steel. Wilchings later reported that it was all right, which was what he expected, of course, and this also added to Abbott's confidence.

The day was an unusually hard one. A great quantity of structural steel that had been delayed and which had threatened to hold up the work, arrived that day and the chief of construction was busier than he had ever been. He was driving the men with furious energy. Even under the best conditions it would be well-nigh impossible to complete the bridge on time. Abbott had pride in carrying out the contract and the financial question was a considerable one. Had it not been for that, perhaps, he would have paid more attention to Meade's appeal. So he hurried on the work at top speed.

But a man may be persuaded and yet not satisfied. All day long Abbott, confident, yet unforgetting, had in mind that questionable member. His work kept him on shore a large part of the time and the further away he got from it and from the powerful persuasiveness of the actually existent standing bridge, the stronger grew his unease. He sought to laugh himself out of it, to strengthen his convictions that it was nothing by self-ridicule. He worked himself up into a state of positive resentment and anger against Meade. He cursed him for a fool and himself likewise, still he could not get away from the thought. It was in his mind. Suppose--it was impossible to suppose!

Late in the afternoon, without saying anything to Wilchings, who had resumed his regular work, or to anybody in fact, Abbott went down to look at the member again. He climbed down a hundred feet or more to make another examination at the expense of much valuable time, for he had not passed so busy a day as that one since the bridge began. Abbott's judgment and reasoning told him that it was time thrown away. Nevertheless, despite his convictions, he went. He made another careful examination, and, in fact, duplicated his procedure of the morning. Everything was exactly as it had been. Those hair-line cracks had troubled him a little despite Wilching's remark. He studied them a second time. They were just as they had been, so far as he could tell, no larger, no more numerous. The lacings rang exactly the same under his hammer.

Abbott was cool enough ordinarily, but he was now so angry with himself for having given away to foolish fears, that, in a fit of temper, he threw the hammer into the water--and it was indicative of how the situation had got on his nerves--as he declared to himself that he would not go down there again. By this time old Meade and the bridge people and Curtiss, the chief engineer, must know all about it. He had actually visited the telegraph office a dozen times--unnecessarily, of course, since any wire would have been delivered at once to him. The fact that he had not heard from them gave him renewed confidence. They evidently regarded it of little moment. They were probably laughing at Meade, Junior, as they would laugh at him if they ever learned of his nervousness. He realized, of course, that he could never jack the springing member back into line. As Meade had said, there was nothing to jack against. Also it would be practically impossible to haul it back by turn-buckles attached to the parallel truss. Indeed he had only said these things carelessly. It would have to stay the way it was until he got definite instructions from Martlet what to do.

He climbed back to the floor of the bridge and spent the next half-hour inspecting the progress of the work. The suspended span had already been pushed out far beyond the end of the cantilever. The work on the other side of the river had been stopped. As soon as they got the suspended span halfway over they would transfer the workmen and finish the opposite cantilever. Abbott calculated that perhaps in another week they could get it out if he drove the men. He looked at his watch, grudgingly observing that it was almost five o'clock. The men were nothing to Abbott. The bridge was everything. That is not to say he was heartless, but the bridge and its erection were supreme in his mind. As he stood surveying the mighty structure he felt as Napoleon might have felt when he looked beyond the men and horses who would perish in the next battle he was planning, to the mighty end he had in view.

The material was arriving and everything was going on with such a swing and vigor that he would fain have kept them at work an hour or two longer. The men themselves did not feel that way. Some of the employees of the higher grades had got the obsession of the bridge, but to most of them it was the thing they worked at, by which they got their daily bread--nothing more.

Those who worked by the day were already laying aside their tools, and preparing for their departure. They always would get ready so that at the signal all that was left to do was to stop. The riveters, who were paid by the piece, kept at it always to the very last minute. As Abbott watched and waited he was unusually conscious in some strange way of the wild clamor of the work. He had been standing near the outer end of the cantilever and, as if to get rid of it, he turned and walked toward the bank. The pneumatic riveters were rat-tat-tatting on the rivet heads with a perfectly damnable iteration of insistent sound. The steam winch on the traveler was blowing off steam almost like a locomotive, preparatory to the rest of the night. A confused babel of voices, the clatter of hammers, the slithering, ringing sounds of swinging steel grating against steel as the huge cranes lifted the girders and braces and dropped them in their places, the deeper crash of beams being unloaded from the trucks and dropped heavily on the stringers and floor beams, the clanking of trucks, the grinding of wheels, the deep breathing of the locomotives, mingled in a hard, harsh, unharmonious diapason of horrid sound. Abbott's usual iron nerves had been severely strained that day. Ordinarily he was as indifferent to those noises as if he had been a deaf man. Now they irritated him. In his irritation he turned instinctively to the cause of it.

He was right above the pier head now. He looked down at it through the struts and floor beams and braces, fastening his gaze on the questioned member. There it stood satisfactorily, of course. Yet, something impelled him to walk out on the nearest floor beam to the extreme edge of the truss and look down at it once more, leaning far out to see it better. He could get a better view of it with nothing between it and him. It still stood bravely. It was all right, of course. He wished that he had never said a word about it to anyone. He did not see why he could not regard it with the indifference that it merited. As he stared down at it over the edge of the truss the whistle for quitting blew.

Every sound of work ceased after the briefest of intervals, except here and there a few riveters driving home a final rivet kept at it for a few seconds, but only for a few seconds. Then, for a moment a silence like death itself intervened. It even seemed as if the ever blowing wind had been momentarily stilled. That shrill whistle and the consequent cessation of the work always affected everybody the same way. There was inevitably and invariably a pause. The contrast between the noise and its sudden stoppage was so great that the men instinctively waited a few seconds and drew a breath before they began to light their pipes, close their tool boxes, pick up their coats and dinner pails, and resume their conversation as they strolled along the roadway to the shore.

It seemed to Abbott, who had often noted the psychological effect of the stoppage of work on the men, that it had never been so silent on the bridge before. There was almost always a breeze, sometimes a gale, blowing down or up the gorge through which the river flowed, but that afternoon not a breath was stirring. The void was as empty and as still as the hearts or minds of the workmen. Abbott found himself waiting in strained and unwonted suspense for the next second or two, when the silence would be broken almost as if by concerted effort by the men.

While he waited, his eyes were not idle. They were fixed on the member. The long warm rays of the afternoon sun illuminated it so clearly that he could see every detail of it. In that second immediately below him, far down toward the pier head he saw a sudden flash as of breaking steel. Low, but clear enough in the intense silence, he heard a popping sound like the snap of a great finger. Then the bright gleam of freshly broken metal caught his excited glance.

Abbott instantly realized what was happening. The lacing was giving way. Meade was right. The member would go and with it---- He had a second or two to call his own. The habit, the character of the man put them to the best use possible. The first pop or two was succeeded by a little rattle as it might be a rain of revolver shots heard from a distance, as the lacings gave way in quick succession. It was a sort of accompaniment to what Abbott shouted. He was a man with a powerful voice and he raised it to its limit and expanded it to its full compass.

The idle workmen, just beginning to laugh and jest, heard a great cry:

"_Off the bridge, for God's sake!_"

Two or three, among them Wilchings, who happened to be within a few feet of the landward end, without understanding why, but impelled by the agony, the appeal, the horror in the great shout of the master builder, leaped for the shore. On the bridge itself some stepped forward, some stood still staring, others peered downward. It takes minutes to tell it and to read it, but probably not three seconds passed between the first snap of the first lacing bar and the utter collapse of the member. The great sixty-foot webs of steel wavered like ribbons in the wind. The bridge shook as if in an earthquake. There was a heavy, shuddering, swaying movement and then the six-hundred foot cantilever arm plunged downward, as a great ship falls into the trough of a mighty sea. Sharp-keyed sounds cracked out overhead as the truss parted at the apex, the outward half inclining to the water, the inward half sinking straight down.

Shouts, oaths, screams rose, heard faintly above the mighty bell-like requiem of great girders, struts, and ties smiting other members and ringing in the ears of the helpless men like doom. Then, with a fearful crash, with a mighty shiver, the landward half collapsed on the low shore, like a house of cards upon which has been laid the weight of a massive hand. The river section, carrying the greater load at the top and torn from its base, plunged, like an avalanche of steel, two hundred feet down into the river, throwing far ahead of it, as from a giant catapult, the traveler on the outward end of the suspended span and a locomotive on the floor beneath.

Wilchings, and the few men safe on the shore, stood trembling, looking at the bare pier head, at the awful tangled mass of wreckage on the shore between the pier and the bank; floor beam and stringer, girder and strut, bent, twisted, broken in ragged and horrible ruin, while the water, deeper than the chasm it had cut, rolled its waves smoothly over the agitations of the great plunge beyond the pier. They stared sick and faint at the tangled, interwoven mass of steel, ribboning in every direction--for in the main the rivets held so it was not any defect of joints, but structural weakness in the body of the members that had brought it down--and inclosing as in a net many bodies that a few seconds before had been living men.

They had seen body after body hurled through the air from the outward end and, as they gazed fearfully in horror here and there dark figures floated to the surface of the water. They caught glimpses of white, dead faces as the mighty current rolled them under and swept them on. And no sound came from the hundred and fifty who had gone down with the bridge. The two-hundred foot fall would have killed them without the smashing and battering and crashing of the great girders that had fallen upon them or driven them from the floor and hurled them, crushed and broken, into the river.

They stared across the crumpled ruin between them and the pier and out beyond the now frightfully bare stretch of water to the uncompleted truss still rising grandly on the other side and the very contrast between its mass and strength and splendor emphasized the frightful, awe-inspiring nakedness of the battered pier before them.

Yes, Meade had been right. Abbott had one swift flash of acknowledgment, one swift moment packed with such regrets as might fill a lifetime--an eternity in a Hell of Remorse--before he, like the rest, had gone down with the bridge!