Part 20

"Up, up, goddam it! where are your ears?"

"Come on, men, last door."

"My shovel you son-of-a--!"

Now they were tapping on Number 6. The melter came out of his shanty; he had had a sleep since the last furnace tapped. He rubbed his eyes, and went out on the gallery. I could hear his "Heow." Four poor devils were standing in the flame, putting in manganese. Thank God, I don't shovel for Six.

"A jigger," from Fred.

"Sure."

When I went for it, the sores on the bottom of my feet hurt, so that I walked on the edges of my shoes. I was so delighted with the idea of its being six o'clock, with no back-walls ahead, that I almost took pleasure in that foot. I stopped in front of a fountain and put my right arm under the water.

The recorder in the Bessemer was asleep. He was a boy of twenty. I woke him up, and grinned in his face.

"Fifteen thou' for Number 7."

"You go to hell, with your goddam Number 7!"

I grinned at him again, knew it was just the long turn, knew he'd give me that fifteen thousand pounds; went down stairs again--

Twenty minutes of seven. It's light. Nobody talks, but everyone dresses in a hurry. Everyone's face looks grave from fatigue--eyes dead. We leave at ten minutes of seven.

7 A.M. Monday

It's a problem--a damn problem--whether to walk fast and get home quick, or walk slow and sort of rest. I try to go fast, and have the sense of lifting my legs, not with the muscles, but with something else. I shake my head to get it clearer. One bowl of oatmeal. Coffee. "I feel all right." I get up and am conscious of walking home quietly and evenly, without any further worry about the difficulty of lifting my feet. "The long turns, they're not so bad," I say out loud, and stumble the same second on the stairs. I get up, angry, and with my feet stinging with pain. Old thought comes back: "Only seven to eight hours sleep. Bed. Quick." I push into my room--the sun is all over my bed. Pull the curtain; shut out a little. Take off my shoes. It's hard work trying to be careful about it, and it's darn painful when I'm not careful. Sit on the bed, lift up my feet. Feel burning all over; wonder if I'll ever sleep. Sleep.

BLAST-FURNACE APPRENTICESHIP

At the end of every shift, when I walked toward the green mill-gate just past the edge of the power house, I could look over toward the blast-furnaces. There were five of them, standing up like mammoth cigars some hundred feet in height. A maze of pipes, large as tunnels, twisted about them, and passed into great boilers, three or four of which arose between each two furnaces. These, I learned, were "stoves" for heating the blast. I had had in mind for several days asking for a transfer to this interesting apparatus. There was less lifting of dead weight on the blast-furnace jobs than on the open-hearth. Besides, I wanted to see the beginning of the making of steel--the first transformation the ore catches, on its way toward becoming a steel rail, or a surgical instrument.

I went to see the blast-furnace superintendent, Mr. Beck, at his house on Superintendent's Hill.

"I'm working on the open-hearth," I said, "and want very much to get transferred to the blast-furnace. I intend to learn the steel business, and want to see the beginnings of things."

"How much education?" he asked.

"I graduated from college," I said, "Yale College." Would that complicate the thing, I wondered, or get in the way? I wanted badly to sit down for a talk, tell him the whole story--army, Washington, hopes and fears; I liked him a good deal. But he was in a hurry--perhaps that might come on a later day.

We talked a little. He said I ought to come into the office for a while and "learn to figure burdens." I replied that I wanted the experience of the outside, and a start at the bottom.

"All right," he said, "I'll put you outside. Come Monday morning."

On Monday morning I followed the cindered road inside the gate for three hundred yards, turned off across a railroad track, and passed a machine-shop. The concrete bases of the blast-furnaces rose before me. Somebody had just turned a wheel on the side of one of the boiler-like "stoves," and a deafening blare, like tons of steam getting away, broke on my eardrums. I asked where the office was.

"Through there."

Up some steps, over a concrete platform, past the blaring "stove," I went, to the other side of the furnaces, and found there a flat dirty building--the office. Inside was Mr. Beck, who turned me over at once to Adolph, the "stove-gang boss."

I was a little anxious over this introduction to things, and thought it might embarrass or prevent comradeships. But it didn't. No one knew, or if he did, ever gave it a thought. It may perhaps have accounted for Adolph's letting me keep my clothes in his shanty that night, and for considerable conversation he vouchsafed me on the first day. But my individuality passed quickly, very quickly; I became no more than a part of that rather dingy unit, the stove-gang.

While I was putting on my clothes in Adolph's sheet-iron shanty, he grinned and said: "Last time, pretty dirty job, too, eh?"

"Yes," I said, "open-hearth."