"Hey! don't use that shovel for mud!" said the second-helper on Number
4.
So I didn't.
I wheeled back to the gallery behind Seven, and found Nick coming out
at me. When he saw that hard-won mud of mine, I thought he was going to
snap the cords in his throat.
"Goddam it!" he said, when articulation returned, "I tell you, get
wheelbarrow dolomite, and half-wheelbarrow clay, and pail of water, and
look what you bring, goddam it!"
So that was it--he probably said pail of water with his feet.
"Oh, all right," I said, smiling like a skull; "I thought you said mud.
I'll get it, I'll get it."
This is amusing enough on the first day; you can go off and laugh in a
superior way to yourself about the queer words the foreigners use. But
after seven days of it, fourteen hours each, it gets under the skin, it
burns along the nerves, as the furnace heat burns along the arms when
you make back-wall. It suddenly occurred to me one day, after someone
had bawled me out picturesquely for not knowing where something was that
I had never heard of, that this was what every immigrant Hunky endured;
it was a matter of language largely, of understanding, of knowing the
names of things, the uses of things, the language of the boss. Here was
this Serbian second-helper bossing his third-helper largely in an
unknown tongue, and the latter getting the full emotional experience of
the immigrant. I thought of Bill, the pit boss, telling a Hunky to do a
clean-up job for him; and when the Hunky said, "What?" he turned to me
and said: "Lord! but these Hunkies are dumb."
Most of the false starts, waste motion, misunderstandings, fights,
burnings, accidents, nerve-wrack, and desperation of soul would fall
away if there were understanding--a common language, of mind as well as
tongue.
But then, I thought, all this may be because I'm oversensitive. I had
this qualm till one day I met Jack. He was an old regular-army sergeant,
a man about thirty. He had come back from fixing a bad spout. They had
sledged it out--sledged through the steel that had crept into the
dolomite and closed the tap-hole.
"Do you ever feel low?" he said, sitting down on the back of a shovel.
"Every once'n while I feel like telling 'em to take their job and go to
hell with it; you strain your guts out, and then they swear at you."
"I sometimes feel like a worm," I said, "with no right to be living any
way, or so mad I want to lick the bosses and the president."
"If you were first-helper, it wouldn't be so bad," he mused; "you
wouldn't have to bring up that damn manganese in a wheelbarrow--and they
wouldn't kick you round so much." "Will I ever get that job?"
We were washing up at one end of the mill, near the Bessemers. There was
plenty of hot water, and good broad sinks. I took off my shirt and threw
it on top of a locker; the cinder on the front and sleeves had become
mud.
Forty men stood up to the sinks, also with their shirts off, their arms
and faces and bodies covered with soap, and saying: "Ah, ooh," and
"ffu," with the other noises a man makes when getting clean. Every now
and then somebody would look into a three-cornered fragment of
looking-glass on one of the lockers, and return to apply soap and a
scrubbing-brush to the bridge of his nose.
A group of Slovene boys, who worked on the Bessemer, picked on one of
their number, and covered him with soap and American oaths. Somebody
told an obscene story loudly in broken English.
The men who had had a long turn or a hard one washed up silently, except
for excessive outbreaks if anybody took their soap. Some few hurried,
and left grease or soot on their hands or under their eyes.
"I wash up a little here," said Fred, the American first-helper on
Number 7, "and the rest at home. Once after a twenty-four hour shift, I
fell asleep in the bathtub, and woke up to find the water cold. Of
course, you can't really get this stuff off in one or two washups. It
gets under your skin. When the furnace used to get down for repairs, and
we were laid off, I'd be clean at the end of a week." He laughed and
went off.
I had scraped most of the soot from arms and chest, and was struggling
desperately with the small of my back. A thick-chested workman at the
next bowl, with fringes of gray hair, and a scar on his cheek, grabbed
the brush out of my hand.
"Me show you how we do in coal-mine," he said; and proceeded vigorously
to grind the bristles into my back, and get up a tremendous lather,
that dripped down on my trousers to the floor.
"You wash your buddy's back, buddy wash yours," he said.
I went out of the open-hearth shelter slowly, and watched the
line--nearly a quarter of a mile long--of swinging dinner-buckets. Some
were large and round, and had a place on top for coffee; some were
circular and long; some were flat and square. I looked at the men. They
were the day-shift coming in.
"I have finished," I said to myself automatically. "I'm going to eat and
go to bed. I don't have to work now."
I looked at the men again. Most of them were hurrying; their faces
carried yesterday's fatigue and last year's. Now and then I saw a man
who looked as if he could work the turn and then box a little in the
evening for exercise. There were a few men like that. The rest made me
think strongly of a man holding himself from falling over a cliff, with
fingers that paralyzed slowly.
I stepped on a stone and felt the place on my heel where the limestone
and sweat had worked together, to make a burn. I'd be hurrying in at
5.00 o'clock that day, and they'd be going home. It was now 7.20. That
would be nine and a half hours hence. I had to eat twice, and buy a pair
of gloves, and sew up my shirt, and get sleep before then. I lived
twenty minutes from the mill. If I walk home, as fast as I can drive my
legs and bolt breakfast, seven hours is all I can work in before 3.30.
I'll have to get up then to get time for dinner, fixing up my shirt, and
the walk to the mill.
I wonder how long this night-shift of gray-faced men, with
different-sized dinner-buckets, will be moving out toward the green
gate, and the day-shift coming in at the green gate--how many years?
The car up from the nail mill stopped just before it dove under the
railroad bridge.
"I'm in luck."
I suddenly had a vision of how the New York subway looked: its crush,
its noise, its overdressed Jews, its speed, its subway smell. I looked
around inside the clattering trolley-car. Nobody was talking. The car
was filled for the most part with Slavs, a few Italians, and some
negroes from the nail mill. Everyone, except two old men of unknown age,
was under thirty-five. They held their buckets on their laps, or put
them on the floor between their legs. Six or eight were asleep. The rest
sat quiet, with legs and neck loose, with their eyes open, steady, dull,
fixed upon nothing at all.