CHAPTER XIII. SCENE IN A ROLLING MILL

The rolling mill where father worked was Life's Big Circus tent to me,

and like a kid escaped from school, eager to get past the tent flap and

mingle with the clowns and elephants, I chucked my job sorting nails

when I found an opening for a youngster in the rolling mill. Every

puddler has a helper. Old men have both a helper and a boy. I got a

place with an old man, and so at the age of twelve I was part of the Big

Show whose performance is continuous, whose fire-eaters have real flame

to contend with, and whose snake-charmers risk their lives in handling

great hissing, twisting red-hot serpents of angry iron.

In this mill there is a constant din by day and night. Patches of white

heat glare from the opened furnace doors like the teeth of some great

dark, dingy devil grinning across the smoky vapors of the Pit. Half

naked, soot-smeared fellows fight the furnace hearths with hooks,

rabbles and paddles. Their scowling faces are lit with fire, like

sailors manning their guns in a night fight when a blazing fire ship

is bearing down upon them. The sweat runs down their backs and arms and

glistens in the changing lights. Brilliant blues and rays of green and

bronze come from the coruscating metal, molten yet crystallizing into

white-hot frost within the furnace puddle. Flaming balls of woolly iron

are pulled from the oven doors, flung on a two-wheeled serving tray, and

rushed sputtering and flamboyant to the hungry mouth of a machine,

which rolls them upon its tongue and squeezes them in its jaw like a cow

mulling over her cud. The molten slag runs down red-hot from the jaws of

this squeezer and makes a luminous rivulet on the floor like the water

from the rubber rollers when a washer-woman wrings out the saturated

clothes. Squeezed dry of its luminous lava, the white-hot sponge is

drawn with tongs to the waiting rollers--whirling anvils that beat

it into the shape they will. Everywhere are hurrying men, whirring

flywheels, moving levers of steam engines and the drum-like roar of the

rolling machines, while here and there the fruits of this toil are seen

as three or four fiery serpents shoot forth from different trains of

rollers, and are carried away, wrought iron fit for bridging the creek,

shoeing the mule and hooping the barrel that brings the farmers apples

into town.

“Life in these mills is a terrible life,” the reformers say. “Men are

ground down to scrap and are thrown out as wreckage.” This may be so,

but my life was spent in the mills and I failed to discover it. I

went in a stripling and grew into manhood with muscled arms big as a

bookkeeper's legs. The gases, they say, will destroy a man's lungs,

but I worked all day in the mills and had wind enough left to toot a

clarinet in the band. I lusted for labor, I worked and I liked it.

And so did my forefathers for generations before me. It is no job for

weaklings, but neither was tree-felling, Indian fighting, road-making

and the subduing of a wild continent to the hand of man as was done by

the whole tribe of Americans for the sheer joy of conquering the wild.

There is something in man that drives him forward to do the world's work

and build bigger for the coming generations, just as there is something

in nature that causes new growth to come out of old dirt and new worlds

to be continually spawned from the ashes of old played-out suns and

stars. When nature ceases to mold new worlds from the past decay, the

universe will wither; and when man loses the urge to build and goes to

tearing down, the end of his story is at hand.

A tired Thomas whose wife supported him by running a rooming house once

asked me:

“How many do you 'spose there are in the United States that don't have

to work?”

“None,” I replied, “except invalids and cripples. Every healthy man

in this country has to work just the same as he has to breathe. If you

don't want to work it is because you're sick. I'm a well man, and I've

got to be working all the time or I'd go crazy. I have no more desire

to be idle like you than I have a desire to wear women's clothes. It is

contrary to normal nature, and that's why I say that any man that gets

that way is a sick man.”

The fellow was a “free thinker,” as he called himself. He was too lazy

to shave and his beard was always about two weeks ahead of him. He was

working out a plan for communism in the United States. He believed that

enough work had now been done to supply the race forever. It was just a

question of so evenly dividing the goods that all men instead of a few

could loaf the rest of their years.

He had such a tired feeling that he didn't have the ambition of an

oyster. He didn't have enough energy to realize he was all in. He took

it for granted that the whole race was as tired as he was.

He thought he needed one of the Utopias they talk so much about. What

he needed was a dose of castor-oil. I never knew a communist in my life

that was a well man.