I decided on a day off. John had lately taken one for the festival at
New Naples, and had come in to work the next morning with the wine still
at festivals in his head. Sitting atop the blast-furnaces the other day,
looking at the blue rivers and the three hills, and speculating about
men going down to the sea in ships--because of the fat river-boat we
could see--had made me sicken of the smell of flue-dust. I decided to
take a day off.
Sometimes the foreman, when you got back after cutting a turn, would
say, "I don't believe you want this job; you like loafing better; I'll
give it to Jimmy." But with a seven-day week, only the mean ones
hollered. Men took an occasional holiday.
I ate breakfast with a very conscious leisure at George's, putting down
scrambled eggs, at 8.00 o'clock, instead of the coffee and toast at 5.15
A.M.
"No work to-day," said George; "lotza mon', eh?"
"Wrong," said I.
"Mebbe you see best girl to-day."
"Guess again."
"Married?"
"No."
"Mr. Vincent's wife is sick," said George, changing the subject.
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"He no work to-day; come in here for breakfast, ten minutes before you."
Vincent was a young American, twenty-one or two, whose brother I had
known in college. He had not gone himself, but took a straw boss's job
in the pipe mill. He had married six months before, and his wife lived
with him in two rooms in Bickford Lodge--the other hotel in Bouton. We
went to the movies together sometimes, and often met for supper at the
Greek's.
I looked for Vincent, and found him reading the "Saturday Evening Post"
in the front room.
"Elizabeth is sick," he explained. "I'm sticking around to-day."
We fell to talking mill.
"What hours do you work now?" I asked.
"Six to six."
"You get up at five."
"Yes, about that."
"That's not true, Philip," came over the transom from the sick room. "I
set the alarm at four-thirty, Phil sleeps till five-thirty, drinks one
cup of coffee, leaves his eggs, and catches the twenty-of-six car."
"You now have the story," said Phil. "It's a stinking long day, isn't
it?"
"Phil has it all figured out," Elizabeth shouted from the back room.
"From six to nine, he pays his rent--"
"Yes, I've figured it that way," he said. "The money I earn between
nine and one is enough to pay my day's board and my wife's; one to three
is clothes and shoes; three to five, all other expenses; five to six I
work for myself!"
"That's bully; I think I'll figure mine."
"But there aren't any evenings, are there," he went on, "or any
Sundays?"
Suddenly he looked up at the chandelier. "See all the pipes in that," he
said; "I find pipes and tubes everywhere, since I've worked in the mill.
It's darn interesting to pick them out. The radiator in this room is
made of pipe, see; the bed in the back room; notice those banisters
outside. I see them everywhere I look. If I had a little money, I'd put
it in a pipe mill. 'S money in that game, once you get the market;
Coglin and I have it all doped out."
For fifteen minutes, Phil's enthusiasm for pipe-manufacture built the
mills of the future.
Toward noon I went to George's. The pit craneman, Herb, was there,
eating George's roast beef and boiled potato, and looking half asleep.
"I'll fire you," I said.
"I'm on nights this week," he returned, with a slow smile; "I couldn't
sleep, so I thought I'd get up and eat some. Besides, I've got to go to
the bank. You're with the blast-furnaces now, huh?"
"Yes."
"Like 'em?"
"Yes, I think I'll like blast-furnace work," I said, "if I get to be
stove-tender or something. Good boss, Beck."
"They say so. Pete's as crabby as ever in our place. He fired one of the
second-helpers last week, Eric--d'you know him? Used to come in drunk
every day, worked for Jock on Eight."
"That's too bad," I said; "he gave everyone a good time. Let me tell you
how I amuse the gang on the blast-furnace. You know the way they break
ingots for a test on the open-hearth?"
"Yes."
"It's not like that with us. I gave everybody on Five a treat because I
thought it was."
Herb looked interested.
"Of course, on the open-hearth you pick them up with a tongs, when
they're red-hot, and cool them in water."
Herb nodded.
"So there are always halves of test-ingots on the floor, _cold_. On the
blast-furnace the stove-tender pours the test and knocks it out of the
mould. Iron breaks easier than steel, so he never bothers to cool the
ingot, but breaks it red-hot. Last Wednesday I wander up from the stoves
when the furnace is ready to tap. The blower kicks busted halves of a
test-ingot out of the way, and somebody says, 'A little too much
sulphur.' I'm ambitious to learn iron smelting, too, and think I'll
study the fracture. I walk in front of the blower and pick up the test."
Herb grinned.
"It wasn't red-hot," I went on; "but it had blackened over--_just_. I
dropped it, and snapped my hand three feet behind me. The blower, the
stove-tender, the first, second, and third helpers, and the assistant
superintendent, who were all gathered, enjoyed the thing all over the
place for several minutes. It gave them a good time for the afternoon."
When I left Herb, I took a walk through the Greek and Slavic quarters,
and stopped a while on Superintendent's Hill, to study the graded
superiority of foremen and superintendents. There were excellent little
houses here, though too young and new to express any other character
than moderate prosperity. Perhaps it was an ungracious thing to demand
more.
I walked on, past farms, and up and down considerable hills. I lay down
on the ground, in high grass, under apple trees which were near a
tumble-down stone wall. It was enormously satisfactory to lie in the
high grass, under an apple tree, listening to the small August
noises--for a swift hour and a half.
After supper, I wanted badly to take a look at furnace fires against a
night sky, and stepped out alone to do it. Close to the railroad station
I set foot on the hill, and climbed past a Greek hotel and staggering
tenements to a ridge. From there I could look over multitudinous roofs
to the flat spaces by the river, where the mills roared and shone.
I heard heavy things dropped here and there over acres of plate
flooring; they melted into a roar. The even whirr of the power house
increased it, and the shrieks of machinery gave it a streaky quality.
There were staccato punctuations, of course, by the whistles, and when
a distant "blaw" came to me, I thought how loudly it drove into the ears
of the hot-blast man, turning his wheel by a stove. But it was mostly
the summed-up roar that occupied your head--an insistent thing, that
made you excited and weary at the same time. The mills had been running
for ten years; they always had a night-shift in Bouton.
It is easy to get excited about a steel-mill sky at night. I like to
look at them. There weren't many lights at the nail mill but just enough
to show broken outlines of a sheet-iron village there. The rolling-mills
gave some of the brightness of hot billets through the windows, and over
the stacks of the open-hearth were sparks. By closing my eyes, I could
see curdling flame in the belly of Number 7. The open-hearth fires
showed themselves, a confused glow under a tin roof.
Some little light came on the mills out of the night itself, though thin
clouds kept washing the face of the moon, and now and then a
blast-furnace got into the moonlight and looked perfectly confused with
its pipe labyrinth and its stoves.
From where I stood, I could see the Bessemer converter pouring a fluid
rope of white light; I knew it for a stream the thickness of a hydrant.
A rusty, glowing cloud rose over the converter, changing always, and
turning that patch of sky into gold. The pattern of smoke the blower
knows like a textbook, and follows the progress of his steel by the
color of the cloud.
My mind swept over many memories as I looked at the yellow fire of the
Bessemers. There was no order or arrangement in them. They were a
stream, thick in some passages, shallow in others, with scraps of all
sorts riding over the top. One scrap was the price the Wop cobbler
charged for soling, and another, Dick's words when he damned me for
forgetting a bag of coal. Then there were things that wrung me and made
the palms of my hands wet, as if thoughts went over nerves and not
brain.
I looked over at the eight stacks of the open-hearth, closed my eyes,
and saw Seven tapping. The second-helper broke the mud stoppage with his
"picker," and liquid steel belched. Pete held up two fingers. Stanley
the Pole was third-helper with me. We shoveled in the two piles. I could
feel heat in my nose and throat and sparks light on the blue
handkerchief I had tied around my neck. We cooled off in a breeze
between the two furnaces, and as we caught our breath, watched Herb
swing the ladleful, over the moulds for pouring.
I lived through the dragged hours in the morning of a long turn. Between
two and four is worst--I remembered "fixing the spout" with Nick at
three--wheelbarrow loads of mud and dolomite--a pitched battle with
sleep--
At intervals in my memories, I grew conscious of the steady roar the
mills sent me from the river; then forgot it, quite.
Finished ladles of iron came into mind, and I tried to follow in the
dark the path they would take along tracks to the Bessemer. Thick red
ingots of steel, big as gravestones, I knew, were coming from "soaking
pits" to rolls, and getting flattened into blooms and billets. I could
see trainloads of even steel shapes moving out of the freight yard to
become the steel framework of the world.
"It is perfectly certain that civilization is kept from slipping, by a
battle," I said to myself, beginning a line of thought.
An express train shot into view in the black valley at my feet, and
passed the Bouton station, with that quickly accelerating screech that
motion gives. I thought of the steel in the locomotive, and thought it
back quickly into sheets, bars, blooms, back then into the monumental
ingots as they stood, fiery from the open-hearth pouring, against a
night sky. Then the glow left, and went out of my thinking. Each ingot
became a number of wheelbarrow loads of mud, pushed over a rough floor,
Fred's judgment of the carbon content, and his watching through furnace
peepholes. The ladlefuls ceased as steel, becoming thirty minutes'
sledging through stoppage for four men, the weight of manganese in my
shovel, and the clatter of the pieces that hit the rail, sparks on my
neck burning through a blue handkerchief, and the cup of tea I had with
Jock, cooked over hot slag at 4.00 A.M.
A battle certainly, to make an ingot--trench work in a quiet sector,
perhaps, but a year-after-year affair. The multiform steel prop which
civilization hung upon came to me for a moment--rails, skyscrapers, the
locomotive just passed, machinery that was making the ornament and
substance of the environment of men. It rested on muscle and the will to
push through "long turns," I thought. It could slip so easily. A huge
mistaken calculation: not enough coal or cars to carry it. Or what if
the habitual movements of the muscles were broken, or the will fallen
into distemper? Suppose men thought it not worth the candle, and stopped
to look on?
Were we to get more of the kind of civilization we knew, conquer more
ground, or have less of it? It depended on the battle. And that hung, I
was sure, on the morale of the fighter. I wondered if it wasn't cracking
badly--
But at this point I considered how late it was, and whether it was not
time for bed, that I might not have bad morale myself, with a headache
added to it, at 6.00 A.M.
The roar again--I began breaking it up once more into the fragments of
grind and rattle that composed it. In imagination I jumped on the step
of the charging-machine as it moved on its rails past Seven. It shook
and jarred grumpily about its business, I thought.
Near Five I got off, and started to make front-wall. I remembered how I
felt on a front-wall a few weeks ago. I had tried to throw my mind into
the unsleeping numbness that protects a little against the load of
monotony. Other men I had seen do it, drawing a curtain over nine tenths
of their brain; not thinking, but only day-dreaming faintly behind the
curtain, leaving enough attention to the fore for plunging the shovel
into dolomite, and keeping the arms out of heat.
Other passages from open-hearth shifts came into my mind in violent
contrast. Shorty, who was always clearly to be distinguished anywhere on
the floor because he wore his khaki shirt outside his pants, quarreled
with me one day, and showed his temper, as one shows temper in Italy. He
stood by the drinking fountain back of Number 4, hair on end, chest
bare, his eyes a little bloodshot, and his mouth sullen and drawn at the
corners, as it always was. The argument was about a shovel. Shorty took
out a long knife from his pocket and explained its use in argument.
I remembered how the mill stayed in your mind when you left it. In the
hour or so in which you washed up, walked home, ate, and went to bed, it
loomed as a black sheet-iron foreman, demanding that you get to bed and
prepare for the noise and jar it had in store for you at 5.00 o'clock.
That sense of imminence was a thing to bear, especially if you wondered
whether sleep would come at all.
Then there were long strings of neutral days when you did not think well
of life, or ill of it. And there were the occasional satisfactions. The
keen pleasure of acquiring a knack, as when I learned to "get it across"
in back-wall. And the pleasures of rough-house. Jock, the first-helper
on Seven, had once told me in a burst of enthusiasm for furnace work
that he "liked the game because there was so much hell-raisin' in it."
In the midst of listening to the roar, and thinking of shifts, good and
bad, it occurred to me abruptly that men would make front-walls in
front of hot furnaces for several hundred years, in all likelihood. I
wondered. Perhaps Mr. Wells's army of inventors would alter that. For
several hundred years, thousands of men had labored without imagination
or hope in Egypt, and built the Pyramids. There were similarities.
Civilization rested on the uninspired, unimaginative drudgery of nine
tenths of mankind. "There have always been hewers of wood, and drawers
of water," I heard some elderly person say at me, in a voice of
finality.
I did not stop to reply to the implications of that sentence in my own
mind, but thought more closely of the Pyramid-builders I had known in
the pit.
Marco drew Croatian words for me with a piece of chalk on his shovel,
and I put down English ones for him. He had attended night school after
working twelve hours a day in Pittsburgh. But Marco was, perhaps,
exceptionally gifted.
The jobs we did were pick-and-shovel jobs. But have you ever used a pick
on hot slag? There is judgment and knack, and he is a fool who says that
"anyone can do the job." Whenever the chance for special skill happened
by, as in hooking the crane to a difficult piece of scrap, there was an
abundance, and much rivalry to show it off. Could such substance of
"knacks" ever grow into anything more for this "nine tenths of mankind?"
I wonder.
How much of strength, of skill, of possible loyalty, does modern
industry tap from the average Hunky?
I asked the question, but did not answer it--for modern industry. I
answered it for the gang in the pit and the crew on the stoves of the
blast-furnace.
Not half.
There were vast unused areas of men's minds and of their muscles, as
well as of their powers of will, that were wholly unreached in the rough
job adjustment of modern industry. I mean among the so-called groups of
"lower intelligence." It was an interesting speculation whether any
engineer would ever find a means of tapping this unused voltage.
I suddenly thought how inconceivable the stoppage of that roar would be.
A silent valley, with all those ordered but gigantic forces stopped,
would be almost terrible. But just such a silence was likely to happen.
By a walk-out.
The great strike had been going a week, in other towns--tying up the
steel production of the country. Meetings had followed, and riots, with
an occasional bloody conflict with the "mud guard" of Pennsylvania.
Part of that untapped force! I said to myself--dynamos of power of all
sorts. Would it bludgeon over a change in steel conditions, or flow
back, waste voltage, into the ground?
The rumble in the valley again. Could I hear the shake of the
charging-machine at this distance? The Bessemer glow had changed. The
nail mill roar seemed to increase.
I went down the hill. When I reached Mrs. Farrell's and climbed into my
back room, I set the alarm for 4.00 o'clock, putting the clock a foot
and a half from the bed. It has a knob on top, and you can stop it by
knocking down the knob with the palm of your hand. I went to sleep, to
dream about the men who built the Pyramids.