Part 41

Clark shook his head. "You don't understand me--and these people don't understand their own country,--that's all. They don't believe it because they don't know it. They've never tried to know it. To Toronto the district of Algoma is a howling wilderness where there's good fishing and shooting. You may call Canadians pioneers, but some of them are the stickiest lot imaginable. I'm an American, but I have more faith in their country than they have."

"Just what do you propose to do?"

"What would you say was the most influential body of business and financial men?"

"The Toronto Board of Trade--without question; bankers, and, by the way, the president of your bank here is the president of the Board; manufacturers, brokers, commission men,--oh, most every one who is worth anything."

"Then I'd better go and talk to them. There ought to be some Canadian money in this concern and there isn't a cent. The only thing we got in Canada was one hundred and thirty thousand dollars--but that was debt--St. Marys' debt--" laughed Clark. "We'll get some Canadian directors, too; I don't know but that new blood would be good for us."

"Well," hazarded Semple, "I'd like to be there."

"You will. We'll go together as soon as it's arranged. You ought to be there. They'll probably ask you to confirm what I assert." He touched a bell and a moment later said to his secretary, "See Mr. Bowers and ask him to get in touch with our Toronto solicitors at once. I want them to arrange that I address the Toronto Board of Trade as soon as convenient to that body. I'll speak of developments in Northern Ontario. You understand that this will not be a suggestion from me, but will come from them. Get the idea going in the Toronto papers. You might let it be known that a special car will leave for St. Marys the evening of the address--with the Company's guests--that's all."

The door closed and he turned again to Semple. "I'm no prophet, but I don't mind saying that a month from to-day your Conservative opposition won't be so stiff necked. Man alive! it's nothing but ignorance. This district of yours--" he added very slowly, "is a bigger, richer thing than even I imagined."

Semple went away shaking his head doubtfully. He knew better than Clark that chilling regard with which Toronto financiers contemplated an undertaking in which they had little faith. They were a cold-nosed group, immune, he considered, to the dramatic and strangers to any sudden impulse. And Clark, to their minds, was tarred with the same brush as his undertakings. He might be big and imaginative, but he was over impetuous and haphazard.

Clark himself was disturbed by no discomfort, nor did he make any special preparations for that address, and gave it as arranged some two weeks later, and the manner and substance and effect of it will be vividly remembered by every man who was a member of that Board of Trade some twenty-five years ago. There were the bankers and the rest of them, just as Semple had said, and Clark, surveying them from the platform with steady gray eyes, knew what make of men they were and knew also that they had come there not so much with a thirst for knowledge about their own country as that they might coldly analyze him and that vast undertaking of which they had, as yet, but a fantastic and fragmentary knowledge.

It is without question that the speaker had to an infinitely greater extent than any of the men who stared at him through a blue haze of cigar smoke, a fluid mind and the capacity for instantly seizing upon a situation and determining how to meet it. He possessed as well a voice unrivaled in magnetic power and above all an unshakable faith in the potentiality of the district in which he labored, so that, estimating the mental and professional characteristics of those he faced, Clark began to talk in the coolest and most level way possible without any trace of flamboyant enthusiasm. Touching first of all on the development of the far West, a subject with which, since much Toronto money was involved, they were directly familiar, he diverted to St. Marys, describing Arcadia as he found it, the apparently unpromising nature of the surrounding territory and his own conclusion as to its possible future. Then the rapids became woven into his speech, the nucleus of power which made so many things possible. From this he moved into the wilderness and before his listeners there began to unroll the north country in its primeval silence, broken only by the occasional tap of a prospector's pick or the heavy crash of a moose through a cluster of saplings. And with the story of the wilderness came that of pulp wood and great areas now tributary to St. Marys. And after the pulp mills came the discovery of iron.

At this a stir went through the audience. In another part of the north country was Cobalt, that prodigious reservoir of silver, and it was realized that while Cobalt lay almost next door to Toronto, the Canadian investor had for the most part looked on incredulously, till, too late, he realized that the American had seized and acted with characteristic energy. And now the thing had happened again.

"The iron was there," went on Clark's voice with a subtle and impelling note, "and it only took a year or so to find it. The country was unexplored, that is, in a scientific manner, and no geological maps worth anything were in existence. We have proved by now not less than fifteen million tons of excellent ore. The formation near St. Marys carries an abundance of limestone and the rapids furnish ample power. I think you will admit, gentlemen, that this is non-speculative."

Then one by one he spoke of various phases of the works. In every case the product was there--the merchantable produce--to prove the point; and the evident fact that Clark was actually selling goods over his gigantic counter, coupled with the cool confidence of the man, was all that was needed to convert an audience of critics into one of friendly believers.

He saw the change as it took place. His voice lifted a little and became that of one crying in the wilderness.

"What I have been able to do any man can do. If you don't believe in it, other people do; if you don't develop it, other people will. From Canada we have moved across to Michigan and are developing power on the south side of the river. You Canadians could have done all this. In a few months Canadian railways will be buying steel rails made of Ontario ore, but the rails will be made and sold by Americans in Ontario. Gentlemen, all I ask is that you have faith in your own country, as much faith as has been shown by your neighbors across the line. Your Dominion is now what the United States was fifty years ago and we did not waver. The capital of our allied companies is twenty-seven million dollars. It comes, every cent of it, from Philadelphia. We do not need your money, but will welcome any who wish to join us. Once again, gentlemen, and last of all, have faith in your own country!" Then, with a graceful acknowledgment of the assistance of Semple and the Ontario Government, he sat down.

For a moment there was silence, till came applause, moderate at first, as befitted the meeting, but swelling presently into great volume. Louder and deeper it grew while Clark sat still with the least flush on his usually colorless cheek and a keen light in his gray eyes. He had touched them to the quick, touched them not only by his own evident faith and courage, but also by his superlative energy and the inexorable comparison he had made. It was true! Cobalt was nearly lost to them, and now the iron of Algoma had passed into other hands. Old bankers and financiers cast their minds back and were surprised at the number of similar instances they recalled. And here was Clark, the protagonist, Clark the speculator, Clark the wild man from Philadelphia, demonstrating in the cold language to which they were accustomed and which they perfectly understood, that he had done the same thing over again and on a more imposing scale than ever before.

The dénouement was what he had anticipated and what invariably takes place when men with calculating and professionally critical brains are for the first time profoundly stirred by a supremely magnetic spirit that appeals not to their emotions but to those instincts in which the memory of lost opportunities is effaced by confidence in future success. There was, too, a general feeling that Clark in the past was misunderstood. They had been hard on him. It was strange for men who were daily besought to invest in this or that to be told that their money was not asked for; that, as Clark had put in--the job was nearly done, capital expenditure nearly over and steady returns about to begin. And these returns, they reflected, would go straight out of the country to Philadelphia. All this and much more was moving through their minds when the president moved a vote of thanks which was tumultuously carried, whereupon Clark announced that the private car would leave that night for St. Marys, and that he and Mr. Semple would accompany such visitors as cared to spend a day or two at the works.

That afternoon he sent a short letter to his mother. "I have been giving a talk on Toronto--it went quite well," he wrote in closing. "Canadians do not attract, but certainly interest me. There's much underneath that needs work to discover, and I have so little time for work of that kind."

He glanced at the last sentence and nodded approvingly. Perhaps Canadians were too Scotch to be spontaneous. They were worthy, he admitted, but the word implied to him certain attributes that made life a little difficult, and, he silently concluded, a little cold. He would have desired them to be a trifle less deliberate and a shade more responsive. He felt that, however, he might persuade they would never fundamentally understand him, and perceived in this the cause of that condescension he had observed in so many Canadians toward the American. It did not worry him in the slightest as an American. He put it down to that self-satisfaction which is not infrequently acquired by self-made men in the process of their own manufacture, and to remnants of that cumulative British arrogance of forebears who had for centuries led the world.

Early next morning the private car swung through the mining district of Sudbury. Clark's Toronto visitors were still asleep, but he was up and dressed and on the rear platform. The district, covered once by a green blanket of trees, now seemed blasted and dead. Close by were great piles of nickel ore, from which low clouds of acrid vapor rose into the bright air. Clark knew that the ore was being laboriously roasted in order to dissipate the sulphur it contained, prior to further treatment.

The scene, naked and forbidding, struck him forcibly, and the great mining buildings towering in the midst of the desolation they had created looked like ugly castles of destruction. He had noted the place often before, but this morning, refreshed by the incidents of the previous day, his mind was working with unexampled ease and insight. Here, he reflected, two things of value--sulphur and vegetation--were being arduously obliterated. It suddenly appeared fundamentally against nature, and whatever violated nature was, he held, fundamentally wrong.

The train stopped for a few moments and, jumping from the platform, he ran across to the nearest pile. Here he picked up several pieces of ore fresh from the mine, inhaling as he stood the sharp and killing fumes. At St. Marys he made but one kind of pulp--mechanical pulp--in which the soft wood was disintegrated by revolving stones against which it was thrust under great pressure. But he had always desired to make another kind of pulp, so now he thrust the ore samples in his pocket and climbed back into the private car.

Two days later the chief chemist of the works stood beside the general manager's desk looking from the nickel samples into Clark's animated face.

"These are from Sudbury," the latter was saying, "where they waste thousands of tons of sulphur a year, and it costs them a lot to waste it. I want the sulphur to make sulphite pulp."

"Yes?" The reply was a little uncertain.

"To buy what we want is out of the question at the present price. In Alabama and Sicily they are spending a lot of money to get sulphur; in Sudbury they're spending a lot of money to get rid of it. The thing is all wrong."

"Have we any nickel mine, sir?"