Steel Part 5

Move aside the shutters covering the round peepholes on her doors, at this time, and you'll see the brew bubbling away like malt breakfast-food ready to eat. But there's a lot of testing before serving. When it is ready, you run to the place where you hid your little flat manganese shovel and take it to the gallery back of the furnace, near the tap-spout. There you can look down on the pit strewn with those giant bucket-ladles and sprinkled with the clean-up men, who gather painfully all that's spilled or s...o...b..red of hot metal, and save it for a second melting. The whole is swept by the omnipresent crane.

At a proper and chosen instant, the senior melter shouts, "Heow!" and the great furnace rolls on its side on a pair of mammoth rockers, and points a clay spout into the ladle held for it by the crane. Before the hot soup comes rushing, the second-helper has to "ravel her out." That function of his almost destroyed my ambition to learn the steel business. Raveling is poking a pointed rod up the tap-spout, till the stopping is prodded away. You never know when the desired but terrific result is accomplished. When it is, he retires as you would from an exploding oil-well. The brew is loose. It comes out, red and hurling flame. Into the ladle it falls with a hiss and a terrifying "splunch."

The first and second helpers immediately make matters worse. They stagger up with bags (containing fine anthracite) and drop them into the mess. They have a most d.a.m.ning effect. The flames. .h.i.t the roof of the pit, and sway and curl angrily along the frail platform on which you stand. Some occult reasoning tells them how many of these bags to drop in, whether to make a conflagration or a moderate house-burning.

The melter waits a few minutes and then shouts your cue. You and another helper run swiftly along the gallery to the side of the spout.

At your feet is a pile of manganese, one of the heaviest substances in the world, and seeming heavier than that. It's your job and your helper's to put the pile into the cauldron. And you do it with all manner of speed. The tap stream--at steel heat--is three feet from your face, and gas and sparks come up as the stream hits the ladle. You're expected to get it in fast. You do.

There are almost always two ladles to fill, but you have a "spell"

between. When she's tapped, you pick up a piece of sheet iron and cover the spout with it. That's another job to warm frost-bitten fingers. Use gloves and wet burlap--it preserves the hands for future use.

One more step, and the brew is an ingot. There are several tracks entering the pit, and at proper seasons a train of cars swings in, bringing the upright ingot moulds. They stand about seven feet high from their flats. When the ladle is full and s...o...b..ring a bit, the craneman swings her gingerly over the first mould. Level with the ladle's base, and above the train of moulds, runs the pouring platform, on which the ingot-men stand.

By means of rods a stopper is released from a small hole in the bottom of the ladle. In a few seconds the stream fills a mould, and the attendant shuts off the steel like a boy at a spigot. The ladle swings gently down the line, and the proper measure of metallic flame squirts into each mould. A trainload of steel is poured in a few minutes.

But this is when all omens are propitious. It's when the stopper-man has made no mistakes. But when rods jam and the stopper won't stop, watch your step, and cover your face. That fierce little stream keeps coming, and nothing that the desperate men on the pouring platform can do seems likely to stem it. Soon one mould is full. But the ladle continues to pour, with twenty tons of steel to go. It can't be allowed to make a steel floor for the pit. It must get into those moulds.

So the craneman swings her on to the next mould, with the stream aspurt.

It's like taking water from the teakettle to the sink with a punctured dipper: half goes on the kitchen floor. But the spattering of molten metal is much more exciting. A few little clots affect the flesh like hot bullets. So, when the craneman gets ready to swing the little stream down the line, the workers on the platform behave like frightened fishes in a mill pond. Then, while the mould fills, they come back, to throw certain ingredients into the cooling metal.

These ingots, when they come from the moulds virgin steel, are impressive things--especially on the night turn. Then each stands up against the night air like a ma.s.sive monument of hardened fire. Pa.s.s near them, and see what colossal radiators of heat they are. Trainloads of them pa.s.s daily out of the pit to the blooming-mill, to catch their first transformation. But my spell with them is done.

I stood behind the furnace near the spout, which still spread a wave of heat about it, and Nick, the second-helper, beside me yelling things in Anglo-Serbian, into my face. He was a loose-limbed, sallow-faced Serbian, with black hair under a green-visored cap, always on the back of his head. His shirt was torn on both sleeves and open nearly to his waist, and in the uncertain lights of the mill his chest and abdomen shone with sweat.

"G.o.ddam you, what you think. Get me"--a long blur of Serbian, here--"spout, quick mak a"--more Serbian with tremendous volume of voice--"furnace, see? You get that G.o.ddam mud!"

When a man says that to you with profound emotion, it seems insulting, to say, "What" to it. But that was what I did.

"All right, all right," he said; "what the h.e.l.l, me get myself, all the work"--blurred here--"son of a--third-helper--wheelbarrow, why don' you ---- _quick now when I say!_"

"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.

"G.o.ddam 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, G.o.ddam 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 h.e.l.l 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 d.a.m.n 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-gla.s.s 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 sc.r.a.ped 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.

"I'm in luck."

I suddenly had a vision of how the New York subway looked: its crush, its noise, its overdressed Jews, its speed, its subway smell. I looked around inside the clattering trolley-car. n.o.body was talking. The car was filled for the most part with Slavs, a few Italians, and some negroes from the nail mill. Everyone, except two old men of unknown age, was under thirty-five. They held their buckets on their laps, or put them on the floor between their legs. Six or eight were asleep. The rest sat quiet, with legs and neck loose, with their eyes open, steady, dull, fixed upon nothing at all.

IV