A Poor Wise Man | Page 9

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impatience that the labor of the early seventies was no longer to be had.
The Cardew fortune began in the seventies. Up to that time there was a
struggle, but in the seventies Anthony did two things. He went to
England to see the furnaces there, and brought home a wife, a timid,
tall Englishwoman of irreproachable birth, who remained always an
alien in the crude, busy new city. And he built himself a house, a brick
house in lower East Avenue, a house rather like his tall, quiet wife, and
run on English lines. He soon became the leading citizen. He was one
of the committee to welcome the Prince of Wales to the city, and from
the very beginning he took his place in the social life.
He found it very raw at times, crude and new. He himself lived with
dignity and elegant simplicity. He gave now and then lengthy,
ponderous dinners, making out the lists himself, and handing them over
to his timid English wife in much the manner in which he gave the
wine list and the key to the wine cellar to the butler. And, at the head of
his table, he let other men talk and listened. They talked, those
industrial pioneers, especially after the women had gone. They saw the
city the center of great business and great railroads. They talked of its
coal, its river, and the great oil fields not far away which were then in
their infancy. All of them dreamed a dream, saw a vision. But not all of
them lived to see their dream come true.
Old Anthony lived to see it.
In the late eighties, his wife having been by that time decorously
interred in one of the first great mausoleums west of the mountains,
Anthony Cardew found himself already wealthy. He owned oil wells
and coal mines. His mines supplied his coke ovens with coal, and his
own river boats, as well as railroads in which he was a director, carried
his steel.
He labored ably and well, and not for wealth alone. He was one of a
group of big-visioned men who saw that a nation was only as great as
its industries. It was only in his later years that he loved power for the
sake of power, and when, having outlived his generation, he had
developed a rigidity of mind that made him view the forced

compromises of the new regime as pusillanimous.
He considered his son Howard's quiet strength weakness. "You have no
stamina," he would say. "You have no moral fiber. For God's sake,
make a stand, you fellows, and stick to it."
He had not mellowed with age. He viewed with endless bitterness the
passing of his own day and generation, and the rise to power of
younger men; with their "shilly-shallying," he would say. He was an
aristocrat, an autocrat, and a survival. He tied Howard's hands in the
management of the now vast mills, and then blamed him for the results.
But he had been a great man.
He had had two children, a boy and a girl. The girl had been the tragedy
of his middle years, and Howard had been his hope.
On the heights outside the city and overlooking the river he owned a
farm, and now and then, on Sunday afternoons in the eighties, he drove
out there, with Howard sitting beside him, a rangy boy in his teens, in
the victoria which Anthony considered the proper vehicle for Sunday
afternoons. The farmhouse was in a hollow, but always on those
excursions Anthony, fastidiously dressed, picking his way half-irritably
through briars and cornfields, would go to the edge of the cliffs and
stand there, looking down. Below was the muddy river, sluggish
always, but a thing of terror in spring freshets. And across was the east
side, already a sordid place, its steel mills belching black smoke that
killed the green of the hillsides, its furnaces dwarfed by distance and
height, its rows of unpainted wooden structures which housed the mill
laborers.
Howard would go with him, but Howard dreamed no dreams. He was a
sturdy, dependable, unimaginative boy, watching the squirrels or
flinging stones over the palisades. Life for Howard was already a thing
determined. He would go to college, and then he would come back and
go into the mill offices. In time, he would take his father's place. He
meant to do it well and honestly. He had but to follow. Anthony had
broken the trail, only by that time it was no longer a trail, but a broad

and easy way.
Only once or twice did Anthony Cardew give voice to his dreams.
Once he said: "I'll build a house out here some of these days. Good
location. Growth of the