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.