Mr. Robinson fetched me at 1:30 and, with the foreman manager of
the Carnegie Steel Works, we drove out to Duquesne. It took about
three-quarters of an hour to get there--this district seemed to be even
more business-like, and to contain far more blast furnace towers even
than Pittsburgh.
For nearly three hours we went over these mills. Our cicerone was
intelligent and interesting, but I vainly tried to follow the
processes. I have carried away a nebulous idea.
First we saw the furnace where the iron soil is poured in and becomes
molten. It runs out in a great channel of liquid fire which pours
itself into an iron tank. The clinker, which is lighter and remains on
the surface, is stopped by a sieve and diverted into another channel;
thus the two separate. There are seven miles of cold clinker where it
has been thrown out, great banks of it on which a track line has been
built. While we were there the aperture of the furnace got choked up
so the stream of fire had stopped. We watched the men with huge long
pokers that required three men to move, trying to open up the aperture.
After a few minutes the poker that came out was so short that one man
could handle it. This happened several times. There were magnificent
Czecho-Slovaks and a colored man working together on this. Their
clinging, soaking shirts revealed their young, strong, conditioned
bodies. The sweat poured from them. They worked rhythmically and almost
leisurely, as though this thing went on forever and therefore there was
no hurry. They were like dramatic pantomime actors, they never spoke.
The sound of the hissing, spitting, shrieking furnace drowned all human
efforts of sound. Seldom had a furnace mouth remained choked as long
as this one. I wondered why we waited so long for nothing to happen,
but our guide, who knew what we were waiting for, did not attempt to
draw us away. Meanwhile the men probed with their iron instruments,
all in vain. To me it seemed like some gigantic creature shrieking
and protesting that something was wrong. Suddenly, as we stood there,
a great roar and hissing and vomiting, and the flow of orange liquid
fire burst forth with a great rush. As the stream proceeded along its
course fire-work stars rose up and danced in the air above it, stars
that burst, fairy-like, and illusive, and almost insolently flippant.
At night it must be very spectacular. But I had been refused admittance
at night, and even as a day visitor I was told I was the first woman
admitted in ten years----!
We proceeded to follow the liquid through its other processes--though
not all, for at the end of three hours we were not through. But my
head was swimming with sounds and sights, it was as though one had
spent half a day in Dante’s Inferno. Moreover my legs were as weary as
my head, and though I had meant to be back at five, it was six when I
walked through the William Penn Hotel! The attention I seemed to draw
made me wonder whether in those few hours fame had overtaken me in the
press, but when I reached my room and saw my black face in the glass, I
understood the stir I had created in the elevator!
The press resolutely seemed to have a parti-pris against me. In spite
of all my efforts to be agreeable and interesting to the reporters who
came to interview me, nothing of sufficient importance ever appeared
to attract the faintest notice of my existence or my lecture. Either
it was an anti-British feeling, or more likely, that industrial
capitalistic Pittsburgh had not the faintest desire to hear anything
whatever about Lenin or Trotzky that was not vituperative.
With great weariness, and great discouragement and some fear of my
audience, in fact in totally the wrong frame of mind I was driven in
the Robinson’s car, and escorted by the father and son to the Carnegie
Institute at eight o’clock.
The charming Professor of History, James, of Pittsburgh University,
introduced me to a half empty, cold and unresponsive hall!
I prefaced my lecture by asking my audience to allow me, for my own
satisfaction, to express a few words of appreciation of Pittsburgh
before I began my narrative of Moscow. I said:
“I have only been in this country two weeks, but I have had a wonderful
time. As for Pittsburgh, I have only been here three days, but I have
been so hospitably received that I have crammed a great deal into that
space.
“I have seen things in Pittsburgh that the usual Pittsburgher takes
for granted and does not see the beauty of. I have seen a town by day
and by night that looked like a Whistler picture. I have heard in the
night sounds like the sea breaking on the shore, and this was the sound
of never ceasing machinery. I have seen the furnaces and the red hot
steel; I have seen machines with hands and fingers that seemed to have
the reasoning power of humans.
“I worship force as an element, force and energy in humans, force and
power in machinery. You will think me emotional and stupid if I tell
you that I came away from the deafening sound of the steel mill, with
the same feeling I have after listening to Cathedral music. Have you
ever, when you have seen something very beautiful, felt that it was
almost too beautiful to take in? There are moments of happiness too,
when one feels not big enough to contain them.
“The Pittsburgh mills are like Bolshevism, something so tremendous that
my mind cannot grasp it. And this leads me back to my subject: after
all, you have come here not to hear my impressions of Pittsburgh, but
to form your own impressions of Moscow....”
I then proceeded to tell a cold small audience, in halting tones,
forgetting much by the way--the story of my trip to Moscow. And
because it was like talking to a reserved unresponsive person, I felt
paralyzed--I wanted to stop, I stumbled over my sentences and had
lapses of memory! There was no life in my lecture. Moreover, I was
tired, and my head was full of the sound of blast furnaces.... It was
an awful ordeal and I was glad when it was over.
With Ruth Djirloff, I caught the train, Mr. Robinson seeing us off at
the station. He has been so kind.
The train was awful. At last I have something to complain of! How the
luxurious, pampered American can stand his night travelling car is
a wonderment to me. Here at last is something they might copy from
Europe. In England, France, and Italy, it is far more comfortable. My
night is indescribable. The bed behind a curtain is all one gets, not
a square foot of privacy to stand up and undress in. I had to struggle
out of my clothes as I sat or lay on my bed. Then, whenever anyone
passed down the car (and they did pass), they brushed my curtains
which parted enough (in spite of being buttoned), to let in a streak
of electric light that waked me. Moreover, people passed down the car
whistling, and at an early hour in the morning, when the stars were
still in the heavens, passengers who were about to alight at the next
stop got together and talked loudly, ... not a wink of sleep could I
get while two men discussed business matters. Weary as I was, sleep
could not combat the conditions.