I thought quickly over my summer in the mills, and it looked rather pleasurable in retrospect. Things do. There's a verse on that sentiment in Lucretius, I think. I thought of sizzling nights; of bosses, friendly and unfriendly; of hot back-walls, and a good first-helper; of fighting twenty-four-hour turns; of interesting days as hot-blast man; of dreaded five-o'clock risings, and quiet satisfying suppers; of what men thought, and didn't think— And again, of how much the life was incident to a flinty-hearted universe and how much to the stupidity of men. I knew there were scores of matters arranging themselves in well-ordered data and conclusion in my head. I had a cool sense that, when they came out of the thinking, they would not be counsels of perfection, or denunciations, but would have substance, be able to weather theorists, both the hard-boiled and the sentimental, being compounded of good ingredients—tools, and iron ore, and the experience of workmen.
Is there any one thing though that stands out? I heard the train whistle a warning of its arrival. Perhaps, if a very complicated matter like the steel-life can be compounded in a phrase, it had been done by the third-helper on Six. On the day we had thrown manganese into a boiling ladle, in a temperature of 130°, he had turned to me slowly and summed it all up.
"To hell with the money," he said; "no can live!"
EPILOGUE A Furnace-Worker
Talks over the Twelve-Hour Day
EPILOGUE
I have tried to put down the record of the whole of my life, as I lived it, and the whole of my environment, as I saw and felt it, among the steel-workers in 1919. To me the book is the story of certain obscure personalities, and the record of certain crude and vital experiences we passed through together. I think it may be read as a story of men and things.