Part 10

"All right, all right, I'll do it," I said, and went away. I was never in my life so much impressed with the necessity of doing it. His language and gesture had been profoundly expressive--of what? I tried to concentrate on the phrases that seeped through emotion and Serbian into English. "Wheelbarrow"--hang on to that; "mud"--that's easy: a wheelbarrow of mud. Good!

I got it at the other end of the mill--opposite Number 4.

"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.