"Where did you go to school, Andy?" Rod asked him one Sunday morning. They were lounging in the shade of a branchy maple left standing beside the bunk house. Rod had been listening to Andy outline the theory of evolution to an argumentative Swede with a Lutheran complex.
Andy grinned.
"School of experience," said he. "University of life and books. Never graduated. Never will. Always be a student—gettin' plucked now and then. No," he hunched up his knees and smiled amiably at Rod, "I never had the advantage of being formally labelled as an educated man. You're a McGill man, I understand. Find it helps much on the job?"
"Not on the job as a job," Rod answered. "Still, it helps to give me a certain slant at things which pertain to the job. For sheer physical labor you might say a university training is waste. At the same time—"
"What are you doing on the job, anyway?" Andy inquired with blunt directness, although good-naturedly. "You don't have to. Why don't you go play with the rest of the butterflies?"
"I want to see what makes the wheels go round," Rod repeated the only reason he ever gave.
The high-rigger jolted him with his reply.
"We do," he said calmly. "Me and old Jim Handy, And the Christian Swede, and Blackstrap Collins on the boom, and all these Danes and Norskys and old rivermen from Michigan. We make the wheels go round and the master class—to which you belong—lives soft off the proceeds. It must be great to ride always on the band wagon, and to feel the conviction that you are ordained by God to do so, eh? To pop your whip and make the plug lean hard against the collar. What would happen to you if they all balked?"
Rod clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back against the maple trunk. He had finished a creditable week under an exacting hook-tender. It was good just to rest, to look lazily up at a blue September sky through quivering leaves. Sufficient unto the day—
"I don't know," he said unperturbed, "and right now I don't care a hoot. Master class and serving class is all one to me at this particular moment. However, I don't want to ride on the back of the working class—as you put it, as the parlor radicals at school used to declaim—without paying for my ride. I'm not quite so sure of these economic fetiches as some of you fellows. A man can sell his labor, if that's all he has to sell, without selling his soul to the buyer. And that's what counts most. You can hire somebody to cook your food and make your clothes and keep your house in order. But you can't hire anybody to live your life for you, to suffer your pains and dream your dreams. Rich or poor, a man must live his own life. Maybe you fellows are right about the intensity of the class struggle, about the importance of the economic basis being better adjusted. But the fact remains that a man's existence is as much a matter of purely individual longings and visions and strivings as it is of getting his daily bread. It isn't all a matter of material interests, Andy. You can't perfectly adjust human society on a purely material basis. We're all egoists, most of us thoroughgoing egotists as well. We all want to do and be for ourselves. That seems to be fundamental. We can't help it. We're made that way. And there is one thing the altruists and social reformers seem to overlook, so far as the class struggle within any national group is concerned: the crowd that has the greatest driving force, the most cohesion, will always be in the saddle. It doesn't matter whether we like this conclusion or not. If there is anything in evolution, in the whole history of mankind, that is a fact."