Part 24

"Take it easy," I said, "and no get tired, eh? feel good every day?"

"You no can feel good every day," he amended quickly. "Gas bad, make your stomach bad."

So I slowed up on my wheelbarrow loads, sat on the handles, and spat and talked, till I found I was going too slow. There was a work-rhythm that was neither a dawdle nor a drive; if you expected any comfort in your gang life of twelve hours daily, you had best discover and obey its laws. It might be, from several points of view, an incorrect rhythm, but, at all events, it was a part of the gang mores. And some of its inward reasonableness often appeared before the day was out, or the month, or the year.

Everybody wore good clothes to work, and changed in the shanty to their furnace outfit. I usually came in a brown suit, which had been out in the rain a good many times and was fairly shapeless. One day I entered the mill in a gray suit, which fitted and was moderately pressed.

At the dinner-bucket hour in the shanty, I was asked by John the Italian: "How much you pay for suit, Charlie?"

I was embarrassed, fearing vaguely explanations that might have to follow a declaration of price. I suddenly recalled the fact that the suit had been given me by my brother, so that I didn't know the price, and said so.

"My brother give me suit, I don't know how much he pay," I said. That dumped me into another quandary.

"What job your brother have?" I was immediately asked.

I thought a moment and answered truthfully again.

"My brother, priest," I said.

That arrested immediate attention, and I was looked at with respect and curiosity.

Tony finally said, "Why you no be priest, Charlie?"

"Oh," I answered, laughing, "I run away; I like raise hell too much be priest." This was pretty accurate, too.

"O Charlie!" they bellowed.

After that, the gang were friends to the death.

VII

DUST, HEAT, AND COMRADESHIP

One day I was promoted to stove-tender or hot-blast man on Number 6.

The keeper of the furnace was a negro. When he was rebuilding the runways for the tapped metal, I noticed that his movements were sure and practised. He patted and shaped the mud-clay in the runway, like a potter moulding a vessel. When it was tap time, he bored the tap hole with the electric drill easily and neatly; when the metal flowed, he knew the exact moment to lift the gates for drawing away slag. I watched him to see how he managed the four white men that worked for him. They were Austrians, and I found they joked together and showed no resentment of status. Commands were given with a nod or gesture. With the Americans on the furnace, the relation was the traditional one. The negro was light and seemed too slightly built for the job, but he performed it very efficiently, and so did his gang.

The blower was Old McLanahan, a man somewhere between thirty-five and sixty. A long, successful life of inebriety had given him a certain resignation to the ills of man, and enabled him to keep the heart of a viveur throughout his life. His skin appeared thrown like a bag over an assemblage of loosely fitted bones--the only considerable part of him being a paunch which coursed forward into a moderate point.

He was rather proud of being a blower on furnace No. 6.

After the slag had been sampled he said: "Where d'ye eat, boy?"

"I eat at Mrs. Farrell's."

"How much?"

"Seven a week."

"Too much. Pretty goddam good is it?"

"Damn good food," I said.

"Is Mrs. Farrell a widder woman?"