The riveting was finished, the hammers at rest; the man with the pincers crawled out of the belly of the monster. I need scarcely tell the reader who this man with the pincers was. Nor am I ashamed thus to appear before him, for he has very likely seen me in similar costume, though it is true that at this moment I present a rather frightful appearance. The lower part of my face, my neck and breast, are covered with blood, which during the last hour has been running from my nose and mouth. But the three with the hammers only laugh; and one, the foreman, says:
"Next time remember to keep your mouth open, comrade, no roast pigeons will fly into it."
Rather a poor joke, it must be owned; but the rest laugh, and I laugh too: for as the prudent proverb advises us to "howl with the wolves," so I have rarely been able to refrain from joining in any laughter, even when, as at present, it was at my own expense.
But despite the ardent zeal with which I entered into my new calling, I was not sorry that this work inside the boiler was but a temporary task, for which the foreman of my shop had lent me because another shop happened to be shorthanded, very unwillingly, and only at the order of the foreman of the works. To say that he did it very unwillingly sounds like a brag from one who like myself had only been a fortnight in the shop, and whose only work yet had been of the roughest sort, such as handling the sledge. Nor was it any merit of mine that the heavy sledge which others handled with difficulty was as light in my hands as an ordinary fore-hammer, and that my blow could easily be distinguished among the four or five that followed in regular cadence the foreman's stroke upon the glowing iron. It was no merit of mine; and yet in this place, where bodily strength played so important a part, it counted as a high one, even the highest. My foreman was proud of me; my fellow-workmen, in the most literal sense, looked up to me with admiration; and Klaus, whenever my name happened to be mentioned, showed all his white teeth, then shut his lips tight, held up his forefinger, and nodded mysteriously. I had strictly forbidden Klaus to indulge in these mysterious gestures, and Klaus had solemnly promised to avoid them, but in spite of all it was not his fault if all the two hundred hands in the establishment did not have the same exalted opinion of me with which his honest soul was overflowing.
"I declare," said Klaus--whenever I imparted to him some bit of information from my theoretical knowledge of machinery, or from my mathematical acquirements--"you know more about these things than any man in the works, the head-foreman and the engineers not excepted, and you deserve to be at least Chief of the Technical Bureau."
"You are a simpleton, Klaus," I said.
"But it is true, for all," answered he doggedly.
"No, Klaus, it is not true. In the first place, you far over-estimate my knowledge, and in the second place, one can be a very good theorist and at the same time a wretched bungler in practice. But I want to be both a good theorist and a skilful workman, and I must give many a stroke of hammer and of file before I get to be that. Just remember, Klaus, what a time it took you to rise from the common job-workman, who was glad if he could dress his round pliers decently, to the skilful machinist who can fit the straps on a connecting-rod as well as the best--"
"Yes," said Klaus, "but then you and I----"
"Forging is done everywhere at a fire, Klaus, and every piece must be hammered until it is finished; and so must a good machinist until he is finished; and there is much to be done before I can say that of myself, if I ever can."