Chapter II: The Other Passions of the Engineer

Yet Bertram Meade, the younger, did truly love the bridge which he had seen grow from the placing of the first shoe--the great steel base on top of the pier which carries the whole structure--to the completion of the soaring cantilever reaching out to meet its companion on the other side. Meade, Junior, although he had turned his thirtieth year, was indeed young for the position of Resident Engineer, in the interests of his father the designer, of such a bridge as the great International, which was to be the tie that bound, with web of steel, two great countries which lay breast to breast; already in touch save for the mighty river that flowed between them.

By no means would Meade, the younger, have been charged with the great responsibilities of the Bridge had it not been for two things, neither of which would have warranted his employment in that position by the Martlet Bridge Company, but which taken together induced them to give him a trial. The first was his exhaustive preparation and wide experience. No one had ever started in a life profession with better equipment than Bertram Meade. To a thorough technical training at Harvard in the Lawrence Scientific School, had been added a substantial record of achievement. A fine bridge which he had erected in faraway Burma, triumphantly achieving the design despite all sorts of difficulties, had attracted the attention of old Colonel Illingworth, the President of the Martlet Bridge Company.

He had kept the young man under his eye for a long time. When he commissioned his father, Bertram Meade, Senior, to prepare the plans for the great International, the most sought for and famous of bridges, he had noted with satisfaction that the older man, who stood first among the bridge engineers on the continent, had associated with himself his son. Meade, Junior, had recently returned from South America, where he had again shown his mettle. The two worked together in the preparation of the designs for what was to be the crown and triumph of the older man's life, the most stupendous of all the cantilever bridges in the world.

Indeed there was almost as much sentiment as science entering into the designing in the great engineer's soul. After the completion of the International he intended to retire from the active exercise of his profession. If he could withdraw with the consciousness that he had linked together two great peoples and that through the arteries of trade which ran across his bridge their hearts would beat in greater harmony, he would consider that the end had crowned all his work.

He had a high idea of his only son's ability. He was willing to proclaim it, to maintain it, and defend it against all comers except himself. When the two wills clashed he recognized but one way, his own. The relations between the two were lovely but not ideal. There was leadership not partnership, direction rather than co-operation. The knowledge and experience of the boy--for so he loved to call him--were of course nothing compared to those of his father. When, in discussing moot points, the younger man had been unconvinced by the calculations of the elder, he had been laughed to scorn in a good-natured way. His carefully-set-forth objections, even in serious matters, had been overborne generally, and by triumphant calculations of his own the father had re-enforced himself in his conclusions; and the more strongly because of the opposition.

Young Meade's position was rather anomalous anyway. He had no direct supervision of the construction. He was there as resident engineer representing his father. He had welcomed the position because it gave him an opportunity to see from the very beginning the erection of what was to be the greatest cantilever bridge the feet of the world had ever trod upon, the wheels of the world had ever rolled across.

He had followed with the utmost care, constantly reporting the progress to his father, every step taken under the superintendence of Abbott, a man of great practical ability as an erector, but of much less capacity as a scientific designer or office engineer. Meade had watched its daily growth with the closest attention. Like every other man in similar case, the work had got into his blood. It had become a part of his life. He watched it when he was in its presence, he listened for it when in the office and out of sight. The rat-tat-tat of the pneumatic riveters was music to him. Even the greater harmonies of the wind which blew ceaselessly through the deep gorge where the river ran two hundred feet below, diapasoned through his very brain.

In any mood or under any sky he liked it, even when the rains fell upon it and the winds screamed about it standing indifferent to both assaults. But perhaps it appealed to him most at twilight when the hardness and harshness of all the rigid lines of metal, still to be seen plainly in their completeness, were softened in the veiling obscurity of the half light, glowing palely red on the western hills. Then the bridge, poised upon its great pier with its gigantic arm extended over the water dark from the withdrawn sun flowing swiftly beneath, was most beautiful to him.

Yes, Bertram Meade loved the bridge; yet more he loved Helen Illingworth. Should the comparative be used? Right-minded men love many things. Even though they love honor and fame and opportunity and labor and persistence and achievement, they also love their kind; the aged parent, the loyal friend, the happy child. And some love sorrow and some love laughter, but all love woman.

Sometimes there is strife between these various passions. Happy the man who can enfold all the others within his heart without forfeiting or lessening his love for woman. Bertram Meade was that sort of man. He never troubled himself to decide among conflicting claims. They did not conflict. He loved the bridge as he loved his father; and as he loved Helen Illingworth primarily, there was no incompatibility of appeals in this trio of affection.

Sometimes, in fantastic moods, the younger Meade wondered if the bridge in some strange way could feel what it was to him, if it could know that it was more to him than to any man on earth. To Abbott it was a big job, to his father it was the crowning achievement of a lifetime of designing. To Meade, Junior, it was life itself. Because he had somehow decided that as the completion of the International meant much to his father, so also should it mean much to him. For on the day on which it stood finished and triumphant he would venture to ask Helen Illingworth that question which had trembled on his lips a hundred times since he had known her. Until that day he would keep silent.

After the woman, the young man almost idolized his father. Motherless from birth, the older man was all the family the younger had. His father's greatness had impressed itself upon him even before he was old enough to know what greatness was, or in what particular his father could lay claim to it. Nor was the older man so engrossed in his profession, as is often the case with greatness, as to neglect the smaller things in life. The young wife of the elder Meade, new-made a mother, died in childbirth and that made a great difference to the boy. Remorseful and repentant Meade was careful to make the boy his companion, by way of reparation at first and later because it was joy and its own reward to him. The two were thrown together the more by the untoward disappearance of the woman.

The childish admiration of the lad developed into an adoration of his father. When he grew up to be an engineer himself, on more than one occasion he was brought in contact with his father's work and he was able to appreciate its characteristic fineness, its superb solidity, the scientific mastery of the technique of the profession which it indicated. Perhaps his devotion to his father and to his profession, in which his aim had been to be worthy of the older man's great reputation, to live up to it, had so obsessed his mind that hitherto the attraction of womankind had not been very great.

Bertram Meade had enjoyed minor affairs of the heart, as have most young men, but they were ephemeral and evanescent until he met Helen Illingworth. He had taken her in to dinner in her father's house on his first visit to Martlet as the emissary of his own father about the plans of the bridge. It was summer and the Illingworths chose to pass a portion of it in the great big house on the mountain, the top of one of the peaks of the Allegheny range, where Colonel Illingworth could get down to the bridge works in the valley without difficulty if there was need.

Young Meade's life had been a roving one. He had met women all over the world, but he had never spent much of his time in social America and this was the first splendid American girl, gloriously representative of her class, with whom he had come into any intimate contact. He fell in love with her out of hand and although he scarcely dared to dream it--his experience had not made him very bold where such women as she were concerned--he did not fall alone.

There was back of Meade a solid record of substantial achievement in far countries and among strange peoples, where he had been confronted by unknown demands and beset by mysterious dangers. Straight and bronzed and tall and confident enough, except when he looked at her, with the assurance that comes from achievement, and with strength mental as well as physical written all over him, Meade was the modern representative of the ancient guild of soldiers of fortune. He looked at life as the knight-errant of other days who faced the world lordly a-horseback and laid it under tribute of his sword and spear, and to whom the service of woman was the highest duty, the greatest privilege, the supremest pleasure.

Meade was the means of communication between his father and her father. He was often at Martlet that summer. He met her in the city in the winter. He followed her for a brief visit to the South. The next summer found everything settled but a proposal on his part, and an acceptance upon hers. Proposals bear the same relation to love affairs that prefaces do to books. They seem to come first, but in reality they are the last things said or written. And for the time to speak or write he waited for the bridge, she for him.

Indeed Helen Illingworth had been very much vexed at her somewhat restrained lover. She resented it that a man who had been a construction engineer at home and abroad, could possibly be timid even before a woman. When he had not spoken the fateful words at their last meeting she could scarcely veil her disappointment from him. She made no effort to conceal it from herself. And when the engineer came to think of what had happened he cursed himself for a fool, because he had not put everything to the touch. Yet he felt the proper hesitation in which a man should always approach a woman, especially if he craves success. He was not sure of her. It might be that she would say no. The fall of the bridge could hardly have dismayed him more than that possibility. And it was after all better to wait until he had done his work and could point to his not inconsiderable share in it before he did speak. In his ignorance of the feminine heart he half fancied such an achievement might plead for him! He knew not that he needed it not.

So with father, bridge, and woman in his heart--the last as usual being first--Bertram Meade was very much a lover as he stood on the temporary siding and watched the engine drawing the special train, to the end of which was attached her father's private car, rolling down the track toward the bridge for a summertime excursion under the guise of an inspection tour.

If anybody could have weighed in a balance his respective passions, as he stood there by her side confronting the bridge, he would have discovered that for once at least father and bridge together were flying high into the air, uplifted by the power of a greater, a more natural and a final passion.

After all in the long run it is a woman, even though scarcely more than a stranger, who will win over the greatest bridge or the finest parent the world may know--especially in the case of a young man!