ind 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. "Goddam 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 goddam 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 hell, 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. "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. "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. Nobody 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 EVERYDAY LIFE I came into the mill five minutes late one morning, and went to the green check-house at the gate, to pick 1611, the numerical me, from the hook. A stumpy man in a chair looked up and said: "What number?" I gave it. "An easy way to lose forty-three cents," I thought, feeling a little sore at the stumpy man, and going out through the door slowly. I increased my step along the road to the open-hearth, and reached my locker just as the Pole who shared it was leaving. "Goddam gloves!" he was saying. "Pay thirty-five cents--three days--goddam it--all gone--too much. What you think?" "I think the leather ones at fifty cents last better," I said. He made a guttural noise, signifying disgust, and left. I opened the locker, and disentangled my working-clothes, still damp from the last shift, from the Pole's. I removed all my "good" clothes, and stood for a minute naked and comfortable. The thermometer had registered 95° when I got up, at 4.00. For the past few days I had been demoted to the pit; there had been no jobs open on the floor. As I took up my gloves and smoked glasses, I wondered how I could get back to furnace work. Pete was moving with his lurching short steps past Six. "How about helping to-day on the floor?" I said. He snapped back quickly in his blurred voice, "You work th' pit, tell y'--goddam quick, want y' on the floor." I looked back at him, swore to myself, and went slowly down the pit stairs. I couldn't find the gang at first, but later found half of them: Peter the Russian, the short Wop, the Aristocrat, and a couple more, all under furnace Eight, cleaning out cinder. The Aristocrat was trying to get the craneman to bring up one of the long boxes with curved bottoms for slag. The craneman was damning him. There was one too many at the job,--four is enough to clean cinder,--so I threw a bit of slag at Peter (for old time's sake) and passed on. I met Al, and said, "Where are they working?" "Clean up the pipes," he said. The Croat, Marco, Joe, and Fritz were at Number 6, with forks. You see, the pipes run up the ladle's side and release a stopper for pouring the steel. They are covered with fire clay, which is destroyed after one or two ladlings and has to be knocked off and replaced. We loosened the clay with sledges, and Marco watered down the pipes with a hose, to cool them. They were moderately warm when Fritz and I started piling them on the truck. Once or twice the pipe touched Fritz's hand through a hole in his glove, and he yowled, and then laughed. Once or twice I yowled and laughed also. When we piled near the top, we swung in unison, and tossed the pipe into the air. It was like piling wood. I caught a torn piece of my pants on a sharp bit of slag while carrying two pipes, and acquired a rip halfway from pocket to knee. Marco had a safety pin for me at once; he kept emergency ones in his shirt-front. We finished the job in half an hour, and pushed the truck till it came under jurisdiction of a crane. Marco fixed the hooks rather officiously, pushing Fritz and me aside. There is, I suppose, more snobbishness induced by the manner of crane-hooking than in any other pit function. The crane swung the pipes on holders and dropped them in front of the blacksmith shop. We carried them into the shop, Marco and I working together. Inside there were half a dozen small forges, some benches, and a drop hammer. It was the place where ladles and spoons were repaired. The blacksmiths and helpers gave us friendly, but condescending glances. As we walked back, we saw the crane swing a ladle from the moulds into which it had been pouring toward the dumping pit in front of Five. When the giant bucket approached, the chain hooked to the bottom lifted slowly, and dregs half-steel, half-ash, rolled out into the dump. After a little cooling, we would clean up there. With the chain released, the bucket righted itself with a shuddering clank, and swayed in the air scattering bits of slag and burnt fire clay. A little later, we did a three-hour job on those dregs. We loosened the slag with picks first, and then lifted forkfuls and shovelfuls into the crane-carried boxes. A good deal of scrap was in the lot, probably the makings of half a ton of steel. This, of course, went into a separate box. I hooked up a couple of big scrap-hunks, weighing perhaps 500 pounds each, and took some sport out of it. That is one small matter, at least, where a grain of judgment and ingenuity has place. A badly hooked scrap-hunk may fall and break a neck, or simply tumble and waste everybody's time. Loosening up with the pick, too, demands a slight knack and smacks faintly of the miner's skill. We had to go down into a pit, where there was heated slag on all sides, using boards to save scorching our shoe leather. In turning up fractures eight or ten inches thick, there would be an inner four inches still red-hot. At eleven o'clock, I was working at a fair pace, flinging moderately husky forkfuls over a ten-foot space into the box, when Marco looked up. "Hey," he called. I glanced at him for a moment. He was smiling. "Rest yourself," he said; "we work hard when de big bosses come." During the next fifty shovelfuls, the remark went the rounds of my head, trying to get condemned. My memory threw up articles in the "Quarterly Journal of Economics," with "inefficiency and the labor-slackers," and "moral irresponsibility of the worker on the job," and so forth, in them. A couple of sermons and a vista of editorial denunciations of the laboring man who is no longer willing to do "an honest day's work for an honest day's pay," seemed to bring additional pressure for righteous indignation. I asked the following questions of myself, one for every two forkfuls:-- "Isn't it morally a bad thing to soldier, anyway? "Is Marco a moral enormity? "Do business men soldier? "Isn't 'Get to hell out of here if you don't want to work' the answer? Or has the twelve-hour day something to do with it? "Can these five or six thousand unskilled workmen take any interest in their work, or must they go at it with a consciousness similar to that of the slaves who put up the Pyramids?" I had to use the pick at this point, which broke up the inquiry, and I left the questions unanswered. I saw wheelbarrowing