Steel Part 18

"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 a.s.sistant 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 gra.s.s, under apple trees which were near a tumble-down stone wall. It was enormously satisfactory to lie in the high gra.s.s, 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 mult.i.tudinous roofs to the flat s.p.a.ces 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 pa.s.sages, shallow in others, with sc.r.a.ps of all sorts riding over the top. One sc.r.a.p was the price the Wop cobbler charged for soling, and another, d.i.c.k's words when he d.a.m.ned 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 pa.s.sed 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, skysc.r.a.pers, the locomotive just pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sages 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 h.e.l.l-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 sc.r.a.p, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 k.n.o.b on top, and you can stop it by knocking down the k.n.o.b with the palm of your hand. I went to sleep, to dream about the men who built the Pyramids.