"What's happening in America?" I asked.
"Oh," he said, "it's a mess over here. There ain't any jobs, and labor
is raisin' hell. Everybody that hez a job strikes." He looked out over
the water at a tug hurrying past. "I don't know what we're comin' out
at. Russia, mebbe."
In the spring of the year Camp Eustis was an island of concrete roads
and wooden barracks salvaged from an encroaching sea of mud. Its site
had been selected at an immense distance from any village, or even any
collection of human dwellings, for particular reasons. It was to contain
the longest artillery range in the United States.
After wallowing in bog road through Virginian forest, one came with a
shock of relief to a wide, raised, concrete roadbed, which passed newly
built warehouses and, after an eighth of a mile, curved into the centre
of the camp.
It was like any one of the score of mushroom military centres that grew
up on American soil in the years from 1917 to 1919, except that there
was an unusual abundance of heavy guns. They covered field upon field,
opposite the ordnance warehouses, and their yellow and green camouflage
looked absurdly showy in the spring sunshine. Mornings, there was apt to
be a captive balloon or two afloat from the balloon school, against blue
sky and white clouds; and the landscape held several gaunt observation
towers, constructed of steel girders and rising from the forest to a
height of seventy-five or eighty feet.
The camp was crowded with returning overseas units, awaiting
demobilization and praying earnestly for it day by day, as men pray for
pardon.
In a few weeks I should be out of this, going to work somewhere, wearing
cits. What a variety of moods the world had split into, from the
enormous tension that relaxed on the eleventh of November.
Geographically the training-camp was two thousand miles from the
devastations of Europe; and from the new forces that were destroying or
renewing civilization, how many more? It seemed like the aftermath of an
exciting play that had just been acted; waiting here was like staying
to put away properties, and dismiss the actors. It occurred to me that
the camp was at least ten thousand miles from America.
There was one consolation in this interminable lingering amid the spring
muds and rains of Virginia. Duties were light, and there were a hundred
and fifty cavalry horses in the stables, needing exercise. Sometimes we
went out on the drill-ground and were taught tricks by an old cavalry
officer; or hurdles were set up and we practised jumping our horses. The
roads were deeply gutted by spring rains and the pressure of heavy
trucks, but there were wood-trails good to explore, and interesting
objectives like Williamstown or Yorktown. I fell into doing my thinking
in the saddle.
Naturally I wondered about my new job--my civilian job. It was not just
an ordinary change from one breadwinning place to another. It was a new
job in a world never convertible quite to the one that had kindled the
war. It was impossible not to feel that the civilized structure had
shaken and disintegrated a bit, or to escape the sense of great powers
released. I was unable to decide whether the powers were cast for a role
of great destruction or of great renewal.
Even in Eustis we received newspapers. The urge and groan of those
powers naturally worked into phrases now and then, and even into special
tightly worded formulae. I remember newspaper ejaculations, professorial
dissertations, orators' exaggerations: "Capital and labor--Labor in its
place--The proletariat--A new order"--and so forth. I felt confused and
distrustful in the face of phrases and of the implied doctrines, old and
new.
Besides the business of demobilizing the national army, the remaining
regular officers and non-coms went into the school of fire, and
practised observation of shots over a beautiful relief map of the
"Chemin-des-Dames." This was the most warlike thing we did and continued
for several months.
One day I took a walk beside the ordnance warehouses, and looked over at
the rows of guns stretching for a quarter of a mile beside railroad
tracks. In a short time I would be turning my back on these complicated
engines. I was even sorry about it, a little; I had spent so much sweat
and brain learning about their crankinesses.
In that civil life to follow, I began to see that I wanted two things:
1, a job to give me a living; 2, a chance to discover and build under
the new social and economic conditions.
I was twenty-five, a college graduate, a first-lieutenant in the army.
In the civilian world into which I was about to jump, most of my
connections were with the university I had recently left, few or none in
the business world. Why not enlist, then, in one of the basic
industries, coal, oil, or steel? I liked steel--it was the basic
American industry, and technically and economically it interested me.
Why not enlist in steel? Get a laborer's job? Learn the business? And,
besides, the chemical forces of change, I meditated, were at work at the
_bottom_ of society--
The next day I sent in the resignation of my commission in the regular
army of the United States.
Outside the car window, ore piles were visible, black stacks and sooty
sheet-iron mills, coal dumps and jagged cuts in the hills against
greenness and the meadows and mountains beyond. There were farms, here
and there, but they seemed to have been let in by sufferance amid the
primary apparatus of the steel-makers.
What an amazingly primary thing steel had become in the civilization we
called modern! Steel was the basic industry of America; but, more than
that, it was, in a sense, the buttress, the essential frame, rather, of
present-day life. It made rails, surgical instruments, the girders of
skyscrapers, the tools which cut, bored, and filed all the other tools
that made, in their turn, the material basis of our living. It was
interesting to think that it contained America's biggest "trust," the
greatest example of integration, of financial, of managerial
combination, anywhere to be found. Steel was critical in America's
future, wasn't it--critical for business, critical for labor?
I met a salesman on the train, who was about to go into business for
himself. "I intend to start out on a new tack," he said.
He told me briefly his life-story, and how things were forcing him to
start a new enterprise, alone. He was very much excited by the idea. He
was going to quit his employer, having been with him twenty-nine years.
"I'm getting a new job myself," I said; "I've just got out of the
army."
We both fell into silence, and thought of our own separate futures.
What were a young man's chances in American business to-day? I thought
of a book I had just been reading called, "The Age of Big Business." In
it was the story of the first captains who saw a vision of immense
material development, and with the utmost vigor and hardihood pushed on
and marked the leading trails. But apparently the affair had been too
roughly done, the structure too crudely wrought: machinery jarred,
broke, threatened to bring life down in a rusty heap. "No, you are
wrong," I fancied the business leader saying; "it is the agitator who,
by dwelling on imaginary ills, has stirred up the masses of mankind."
I gazed out of the window at the black mills as we passed them. I was
about to learn the steel business. I knew perfectly well that the men
who built this basic structure were as hardy and intelligent--no less
and no more so, I hazarded--as this new generation of mine. But the
job--difficult technical job though it was--appeared too simple in their
eyes. "Build up business, and society will take care of itself," they
had said. A partial breakdown, a partial revolution had resulted.
Perhaps a thoroughgoing revolution threatened. I didn't know.
I knew there was no "solution." There was nothing so neat as that for
this multiform condition. But an _adjustment_, a _working arrangement_
would be found out, somehow, by my generation. I expected to discover
no specific--no formula with ribbons--after working at the bottom of the
mill. I did expect to learn something of the practical technique of
making steel, and alongside it,--despite, or perhaps because of, an
outsider's fresh vision,--some sense of the forces getting ready at the
bottom of things to make or break society. Both kinds of education were
certainly up to my generation.
The train jarred under its brakes, and began to slow down.
"Good luck," I said to the salesman; "I hope you make it all right."
"Good luck," he said.
The train stopped and I found the Bouton station, small and neatly
built, of a gray stone, with deeply overhanging roof and Gothicized
windows. It seemed unrelated to the rest of the steel community. On the
right, across tracks, loomed a dark gathering of stacks arising from
irregular acres of sheet-iron roofs. Smoke-columns of various texture,
some colored gold from an interior light, streaked the sky immediately
above the mill stacks. The town spread itself along a valley and on the
sides of encircling hills on my left. In the foreground was Main Street,
with stores and restaurants and a fruit-seller. I went across the street
to explore for breakfast.
"Can I look at the job?" I asked.
"Sure," he said, "you can look at the job."
I walked out of the square, brick office of the open-hearth foreman,
and lost my way in a maze of railroad tracks, trestles, and small brick
shanties, at last pushing inside a blackened sheet-iron shell, the mill.
I entered by the side, following fierce white lights shining from the
half-twilight interior. They seemed immensely brighter than the warm sun
in the heavens.
I was first conscious of the blaring mouths of furnaces. There were five
of them, and men with shovels in line, marching within a yard, hurling a
white gravel down red throats. Two of the men were stripped, and their
backs were shiny in the red flare. I tried to feel perfectly at home,
but discovered a deep consciousness of being overdressed. My straw hat I
could have hurled into a ladle of steel.
Some one yelled, "Watch yourself!" and I looked up, with some horror, to
note half the mill moving slowly but resolutely onward, bent on my
annihilation. I was mistaken. It was the charging-machine, rattling and
grinding past furnace No. 7.
The machine is a monster, some forty feet from head to rear, stretching
nearly the width of the central open space in the mill. The tracks on
which it proceeds go the whole length, in front of all the furnaces. I
dodged it, or rather ran from it, toward what appeared open water, but
found there more tracks for stumbling. An annoyed whistle lifted itself
against the general background of noise. I looked over my shoulder. It
relieved me to find a mere locomotive. I knew how to cope with
locomotives. It was coming at me leisurely, so I gave it an interested
inspection before leaving the track. It dragged a cauldron of
exaggerated proportions on a car fitted to hold it easily. A dull glow
showed from inside, and a swirl of sparks and smoke shot up and lost
themselves among girders.
The annoyed whistle recurred. By now the charging affair had lumbered
past, was still threatening noisily, but was two furnaces below. I
stepped back into the central spaces of the mill.
The foreman had told me to see the melter, Peter Grayson. I asked a
short Italian, with a blazing face and weeping eyes, where the melter
was.
He stared hostilely at me.
"Pete Grayson," I said.
"Oh, Pete," he returned; "there!"
I followed his eyes past a pile of coal, along a pipe, up to Pete. He
was a Russian, of Atlas build, bent, vast-shouldered, a square head like
a box. He was lounging slowly toward me with short steps. Coming into
the furnace light, I could see he was an old man with white hair under
his cap, and a wooden face which, I was certain, kept a uniform
expression in all weathers.
"What does a third-helper do?" I asked when he came alongside.
Pete spat and turned away, as if the question disgusted him profoundly.
But I noticed in a moment that he was giving the matter thought.
We waited two minutes. Finally he said, looking at me, "Why a
third-helper has got a hell of a lot to do."
He seemed to regard this quantitative answer as entirely satisfying.
"I know," I said, "but _what_ in hell does he do?"
He again looked at the floor, considered, and spat. "He works around
the furnace," he said.
I saw that I should have to accept this as a prospectus. So I began
negotiations. "I want a job," I said. "I come from Mr. Towers. Have you
got anything now?"
He looked away again and said, "They want a man on the night-shift. Can
you come at five?"
My heart leaped a bit at "the night-shift." I thought over the
hours-schedule the employment manager had rehearsed: "Five to seven,
fourteen hours, on the night-week."
"Yes," I said.
We had just about concluded this verbal contract, when a chorus of
"Heows" hit our eardrums. Men make such a sound in a queer, startling,
warning way, difficult to describe. I looked around for the charging
machine, or locomotive, but neither was in range.
"What are they 'Heowing' about?" I thought violently to myself.
But Pete had already grabbed my arm with a hand like a crane-hook. "Want
to watch y'self," he said; "get hurt."
I saw what it was, now: the overhead crane, about to carry over our
heads a couple of tons of coal in a huge swaying box.
I looked around a little more before I left, trying to organize some
meaning into the operations I observed; trying to wonder how it would be
to take a shovel and hurl that white gravel into those red throats. I
said to myself: "Hell! I guess I can handle it," and thought strongly
on the worst things I had known in the army.
As I stood, a locomotive entered the mill from the other end, and went
down the track before the furnaces. It was dragging flat-cars, with iron
boxes laid crosswise on them, as big as coffins. I went over and looked
carefully at the train load, and at one or two of the boxes. They were
filled with irregular shapes of iron, wire coils, bars, weights, sheets,
fragments of machines, in short--scrap.
"This is what they eat," I thought, glancing at the glowing doors; "I
wonder how many tons a day." I waited till the locomotive came to a
shaken stop in front of the middle furnace, then left the mill by the
tracks along which it had entered.
I followed them out and along a short bridge. A little way to my right
was solid ground--the yards, where I had been. Back of Mr. Towers's
little office were more mills. I picked out the power house--half a city
block. Behind them all were five cone-shaped towers, against the sky,
and a little smoke curling over the top--the blast-furnaces. Behind me
the Bessemer furnace threw off a cloud of fire that had changed while I
was in the mill from brown to brownish gold. In front, and to my left,
the tracks ran on the edge of a sloping embankment that fell away
quickly to a lower level. Fifty yards from the base was the
blooming-mill, where the metal was being rolled into great oblong shapes
called "blooms." A vague red glow came out of its interior twilights.
Down through the railroad ties on which I walked was open space, twenty
feet below. Two workmen were coming out with dinner-buckets. It must be
nearly twelve. I had a curiosity to know the arrangement and workings of
the dark mill-cellar from which they came.
Turning back on the open-hearth mill, when I had crossed the bridge, I
could see that it extended itself, in a sort of gigantic lean-to
shelter, over what the melter had called the "pit." There was a crane
moving about there, and more centres of light, which I took to be molten
steel. I wondered about that area, too, and what sort of work the men
did.
When I reached the end of the track, I thought to myself: "I go to work
at five o'clock. How about clothes?"
No one in the mill wore overalls, except carpenters and millwrights, and
so on. The helpers on the furnaces were clad in shapeless, baggy, gray
affairs for trousers, and shirts were blue or gray, with a rare khaki.
Hats were either degraded felts, or those black-visor effects--like
locomotive engineers.
The twelve-o'clock whistle blew. A few men had been moving toward the
gate slowly for minutes. The whistle sent them at top walking-speed. I
stared at them to assure myself as to the correct dress for steel
makers.
Main Street began at the tracks, and ran straight through the town,
mounting the hills as it went. At the railroad end was the Hotel Bouton,
where I had breakfasted. Beside it was an Italian fruit store sprawling
leisurely over the sidewalk, and a Greek restaurant, one of four. The
Greeks monopolized the feeding of Bouton. A block farther, on the right,
I ran into a clothing-store, a barber-shop, and two rudimentary
department stores. Then, on the same side, a finished city block,
looking queer and haughty amid its village companions.
"What's that?" I asked a strolling, raw-boned Slav.
"Comp'ny store," he said.
I passed a one-story movie "palace," almost concealed behind chromatic
advertising, and then the street twisted and I entered the "American
quarter." Half a mile of neat, slightly varying brick houses, with lawns
fifteen by twenty, and children in such quantity as seriously to menace
automobiles.
I looked at the numbers with growing interest, to discover in which I
should go to bed to-morrow morning at 7.30. The employment manager had
given me the number 343 to try. Here it was, on the right, quite like
the others, and, I guessed, about twenty minutes from the mill.
Calculation of the rising-times for future night-shifts came into my
mind.
I was shown the back room on the second floor--a very good room, with a
big bed, and two windows.
"You can see our garden," said Mrs. Farrell standing at one of the
windows.
I looked out and found the most intensively cultivated twenty-foot plot
I had ever seen or imagined. Behind was the back road and a mud cliff.
The room seemed a little extravagant for a third-helper, but I took it,
in order to have a place for the night, and contracted to pay four
dollars a week.
I walked through a street where the prices of clothing were moderate,
but where there seemed a dearth of second-hand shops. In one store were
green suits, belted, and hung on forms. They had the close-fitting
waist, and were marked, "Style Plus Garments: Our Special Price,
$15.00." The proprietor, who stood in the doorway, to be handy for
collaring the prospective customer, rushed out at me, hands threatening.
He was of the prevailing racial type.
"Fix you up wid a dandy suit," he said.
"What I am looking for," I said, "is something second-hand. Do you have
any?" I shot this out partly as a check.
"Old man upstairs, fix you up. That door."
I went through that door and up two flights, to a room containing an old
man, a sewing machine, and a large table covered with old clothing.
"I'm looking for something for working-clothes," I said; "second-hand
coat and pants."
He lifted a number from the tangled mass of garments, and displayed
them. They appeared to me too clean, too new, too dressy.
"No," I said, "not that."
He searched again and came up with a highly respectable blue coat, with
a mere raveling on one sleeve.
"No," I said, "I'll find one."
I fished very deeply, and caught some green pants, evidently "old" and
spattered with white paint on the knees. He hastened to point out the
white paint.
I tried to explain that I liked a little white paint on my clothes, but
saw I was unconvincing. I finally bought the suit with a sort of
violence for two dollars, and left with a sense of fortunate escape.
Now for a hat. Two blocks down the street I found one, somewhat soiled
and misshapen.
"I'll take that," I said.
The clerk lifted it, and, when I was fumbling for money, brushed off a
vast portion of the dirt, and reshaped it into smooth, luxuriant curves.
But still I bought the hat.
"At any rate," I thought, "I can restore the thing."