Then there were the pants.
That second-hand paint-spattered pair of mine had lasted five days. The
next, a sort of overally kind, had stood it a month, the last week in
entire disgrace; these mohair ones I got at the Company store were going
yet. But the seat needed emergency attention.
After sewing-time, I got up and stared out of the window at Mrs.
Farrell's four stalks of corn. They were doing well. I looked across at
the back road, along which a junk-dealer's wagon jangled. The mud cliff
was the horizon of the prospect. I watched a little stream going down it
among roots, which I had watched a good many times before, and finally
picked up my army field-shoes, and took them out to a Greek cobbler for
resoling.
I shall remember for all time the "blowing in" of Number 9, which means
its first lighting up. A blast-furnace, once lit, remains burning till
the end of its existence. I got inside her, and was delighted to satisfy
a deep-seated curiosity: we crawled in the cinder notch. The hearth of
the furnace lay six or eight feet below the brick flooring, and the
effect of standing inside, with the fourteen round blowpipe holes
admitting a little sunlight, was like being in a round ship's cabin,
with fourteen portholes, except that the hollow furnace shot up to dark
distances that the light didn't penetrate.
We built a scaffolding six or eight feet above the hearth to hold
firewood, and filled in beneath with shavings and kindling. Then we took
in cords upon cords of six-foot sticks and set them on end on top; there
were two or three layers of these, and on top of them, according to the
orthodox rule, were dumped quantities of coke, dumped down from the top,
of course, by skips; and above that, light charges of ore. Below the
scaffold, we spent half a day arranging kindling, with shavings placed
at each blowpipe hole. When the wood was arranged,--a three-days'
job,--the crane brought us some barrels of petrol, and we poured about
half a one in each blowpipe hole. The cinder notch was likewise
thoroughly provided with soaked shavings. That was to be the torch.
Men assembled as at a house-raising. Nobody worked from 11.00 to 12.00
on the day of blowing in Number 9. From all parts of the blast-furnace
they came, and arranged themselves about the cinder notch, and on the
girders above. The men and their bosses came. There was the labor
foreman, and the foreman of all the carpenters, of all the window-glass
fixers, all the blowers, the electricians, the master mechanic. Then
came the superintendent of the open-hearth and Bessemer, Mr. Towers, and
Mr. Brown his boss; and, finally, Mr. Erkeimer, the G. M., with an
unknown Mr. Clark from Pittsburgh.
We waited from 11.00 to 12.00 for Mr. Clark to come and drop a spark
into the shavings. When he arrived the crowd parted quickly for him,
and, with Mr. Erkeimer and Mr. Swenson, he stood talking and smiling for
some minutes more at the notch. Mr. Clark was a tall slender person,
with glasses and an aspect of unfamiliarity with a blast-furnace
environment. No one knew, or ever found out, who he was. Mr. Swenson
showed him, very carefully, how to ignite the shavings with a teapot
lamp. Twice the photographer, who had come early, got focused for the
awful moment, and twice Mr. Clark deferred lighting the shavings and
went on talking with Mr. Swenson. Finally, he bent over and lit them.
Mr. Swenson rapidly turned to the gang behind him.
"Three cheers for Mr. Clark!" he cried, raising his hand. When it is
recalled that none of us knew the man we cheered, it wasn't a bad noise.
The furnace smoked lustily in a few minutes, and several helpers rushed
around it to thrust red-hot tapping bars in the blow-holes. They
ignited at once the petroleum and shavings packed around them.
Immediately after the cheers, Mr. Swenson's bright-looking office-boy
hurried through the gang with a box of cigars, another immemorial custom
in operation. The more aggressive got cigars, then disappeared. It was a
little odd during the afternoon to see a sweat-drenched cinder-snapper
at his work with a long black cigar between his teeth. When they were
burned out, the department settled back to normal production.
Many years might pass before such another occasion in that place. During
that period there would be no slackening of the melting fires, or of the
work of the helpers who kept them alive.
I stood on the platform waiting for the 10.05 train, and turned for a
look at the landscape of brick and iron. I remembered a Hunky who had
worked in the tube-mill for eighteen years and at length decided to go
back to the old country. On the day he left, he went out the usual gate
at the tempered after-work pace, walked the gravel path to the railroad
embankment, and stopped for a moment to look back at the mill. He stood
like a stone-pile on the embankment for a quarter of an hour, looking at
the cluster of steel buildings and stacks. He had spent a life in them,
making pipe, and I haven't a doubt this was the first time it came to
him in perspective. From my own brief memories, I could guess at those
fifteen minutes: pain, struggle, monotony, rough-house, laughter,
endurance, but principally toil without imagination.
I thought quickly over my summer in the mills, and it looked rather
pleasurable in retrospect. Things do. There's a verse on that sentiment
in Lucretius, I think. I thought of sizzling nights; of bosses, friendly
and unfriendly; of hot back-walls, and a good first-helper; of fighting
twenty-four-hour turns; of interesting days as hot-blast man; of dreaded
five-o'clock risings, and quiet satisfying suppers; of what men thought,
and didn't think-- And again, of how much the life was incident to a
flinty-hearted universe and how much to the stupidity of men. I knew
there were scores of matters arranging themselves in well-ordered data
and conclusion in my head. I had a cool sense that, when they came out
of the thinking, they would not be counsels of perfection, or
denunciations, but would have substance, be able to weather theorists,
both the hard-boiled and the sentimental, being compounded of good
ingredients--tools, and iron ore, and the experience of workmen.
Is there any one thing though that stands out? I heard the train whistle
a warning of its arrival. Perhaps, if a very complicated matter like the
steel-life can be compounded in a phrase, it had been done by the
third-helper on Six. On the day we had thrown manganese into a boiling
ladle, in a temperature of 130 deg., he had turned to me slowly and summed
it all up.
"To hell with the money," he said; "no can live!"