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.
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?
"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 ahead for the afternoon, and corralled the only one properly balanced, when I started work at 1.00 P.M., keeping it near me during a scrap-picking hour, until the job should break. At 2.15, it did. Al said: "Get over and clean out under Seven. If we can ever get this goddam stuff cleaned out--" That was an optimism of Al's.
One of the new men and I worked together all afternoon: pick at the slag, shovel, wheelbarrow, dump in the box, hook up to crane. Start over. There was a lot of dolomite and old fine cinder, very dusty, but not hot. This change in discomfort furnished a sensation almost pleasurable. I found out that everyone hid his shovel at the end of the shift, beside piles of brick in the cellar of the mill, under dark stairways, and so forth. I hadn't yet acquired one, but used mostly a fork, which isn't so personal an instrument, and of which there seemed to be a common supply. I felt keen to "acquire" though.