Youth Challenges Part 33

If Bonbright had been interested in any phase of his father's business it had been in the machine shops. Now he saw how costly were those antique processes, how wasteful of time and labor. His father's profits were large; Bonbright saw very quickly how a revolution in methods would make them enormous. But he knew that revolution would not take place--the Ancestors forbade....

The thing had started at the first moment of his connection with Malcolm Lightener as an employee. He had reported promptly at seven o'clock, and found Lightener already in his office. It was Lightener's custom to come down and to go home later for breakfast.

"Morning," said Lightener. "Where's your overalls?"

"Overalls?" said Bonbright.

"Didn't I tell you to bring some? You'll need 'em. Wait, I'll send a boy out for some--while we have a talk....Now then, you've got a job.

After six o'clock you and I continue on the same basis as before; between seven in the morning and six at night you're one of the men who work for me--and that's all. You get no favors. What they get you get....There aren't any soft jobs or hangers-on here. Everybody earns what he's paid--or he finds he isn't getting paid. Clear?"

"Perfectly," said Bonbright, not wholly at his ease.

"The object of this plant is to make automobiles--to make GOOD automobiles, and to make the most of them that can be made. If one man falls down on his job it delays everybody else. Suppose one man finis.h.i.+ng THIS"--he held up a tiny forging--"does a botch job....

There's just one of these to a car, and he's held up the completion of a car. That means money.... Suppose the same man manages to turn out two perfect castings like this in the time it once took to turn out one.... Then he's a valuable man, and he hustles up the whole organization to keep even with him. Every job is important because it is a part of the whole operation, which is the turning out of a complete automobile. Understand?"

"Yes."

"Some men are created to remain laborers or mechanics all their lives.

Some are foreordained bookkeepers. A few can handle labor--but that's the end of them. A very few have executive and organizing and financial ability. The plums are for them.... Every man in this plant has a chance at them. You have.... On the other hand, you can keep on earning what you're getting now until you're sixty. It's up to you.... I'm giving you a start. That's not sentiment. It's because you've education and brains--and there's something in heredity. Your folks have been successful--to a degree and in their own way. I'm making a bet on you--that's all. I'm taking a chance that you'll pay back at the box office what you're going to cost for some months. In other words, instead of your paying for your education, I'm sending you to school on the chance that you'll graduate into a man that will make money for me.

But you've got to make good or out you go. Fair?"

"Yes," said Bonbright.

"All right. Remember it....You've got the stuff in you to make a man at the top--maybe. But you don't start at the top. You've got to scramble up just like anybody else. Right now you're not worth a darn. You don't know anything and you can't do anything. Day labor's where you belong--but you couldn't stand it. And it wouldn't be sense to put you at it, or I would. I'd set you to sweeping out the machine shops if I thought you needed it....Maybe you figured on sitting at a mahogany desk?"

"I came to do whatever you put me at," Bonbright said. "I've been fed up on sitting at a mahogany desk."

"Good--if you mean it. I hear a lot of four flush about what men are willing to do. Heaps of them repeat copybook plat.i.tudes....You're going to wear overalls and get your hands dirty. If you don't like it you can always quit....I know how to do darn nearly everything that's done in this place. The man who gets up near me has got to know it, too." Here was a hint for Bonbright of the possibilities that Malcolm Lightener opened up to him. "This morning you're going into the machine shop to run a lathe, and you're going to stay there till you KNOW how it's done. Then we'll move you some place else. Your place is in the office.

But how soon you get there, or whether you ever get there, is up to you. Like the looks of it?"

Bonbright was silent a moment. When he spoke it was not in reply to Lightener's question, but to put into words a fear that had become apparent.

"The men," he said; "how about them?...You know, father sort of advertised me as a strike breaker and that kind of thing. Our men hate me. I suppose all laboring men feel that way about me."

"We don't have any unions here. I run my own plant, and, by gracious! I always will. I give my men fair pay--better than most. I give them all the opportunity they ask for. I give them the best and safest conditions to work in that can be had. I figure a good crew in a plant is a heap more valuable than good machinery--and I keep my machinery in repair and look after it mighty careful. But no union nonsense.... You won't have any trouble with the men."

Bonbright was not so sure.... Presently the boy returned with the overalls. Lightener wrote a note and handed it to the boy. "Take this man to Shop One and give this note to Maguire," he said; then he turned to Bonbright and jerked his thumb toward the door. Bonbright got up without a word and followed the boy.

In a moment the boy opened a big door, and Bonbright stepped through.

The sight took away his breath--not that he had never seen this room before, but that he was now seeing it through other eyes, not merely as a spectator, but as a partic.i.p.ant. It seemed to him as if the dimensions of the room should be measured not in feet, but in acres. It was enormous, but huge as it was it was all too small for the tangle of machinery it contained. To Bonbright's eyes it seemed a tangle. A labyrinth of shafting, countershafting, hung from the high ceiling, from whose whirring pulleys belts descended to rows upon rows of machines below. It looked like some strange sort of lunar forest, or some species of monstrous, magic banyan tree. Here were machines of a hundred uses and shapes, singly, in batteries--a scrambled ma.s.s it seemed. There were small machines--and in the distance huge presses, ma.s.sive, their very outlines speaking of gigantic power. Bonbright had seen sheets of metal fed into them, to be spewed out at another point bent and molded to a desired form. Overhead conveyers increased the scrambled appearance. Men with trucks, men on hurried errands, hurried here and there; other men stood silently feeding hungry contrivances--men were everywhere, engrossed in their work, paving scant attention to anything outside their task. And rus.h.i.+ng up to Bonbright was a wave of composite sounds, a roar, a bellow, a shriek, a rattle, a whir, a grind.... It seemed the ultimate possibility of confusion.

But as he walked down the aisle, dodging from time to time men or trucks that regarded him not at all, but depended on him to clear the way and to look out for himself, he was able to perceive something of the miraculous orderliness and system of it. He was given a hint of the plan--how a certain process would start--a bit of rough metal; how it would undergo its first process and move on by gradual steps from one machine to the next, to the next, in orderly, systematic way. No time was lost in carrying a thing hither and thither. When one man was through with it, the next man was at that exact point, to take it and contribute his bit to its transformation.... Something very like a thrill of pride pa.s.sed over Bonbright. He was a part of this marvel....

Through this room they walked--the room would have sufficed in extent for a good-sized farm--and into another, not smaller, and into another and another. His destination, Shop One, was smaller, but huge enough.

The boy led Bonbright to a short, fat man. in unbelievably grimy overalls and black, visored cap.

"Mr. Maguire," he shouted, "here's a man and a note from the boss."

Then he scurried away.

Maguire looked at the note first, and shoved it into his pocket; then he squinted at Bonbright--at his face first; then, with a quizzical glint, at his clothes. Bonbright flushed. For the first time in his life he was ashamed of his clothes, and for a reason that causes few men to be ashamed of their clothes. He wished they were of cheaper cloth, of less expensive tailoring. He wished, most of all, that the bright new overalls in the bundle under his arm were concealing them from view.

"You're a h.e.l.l of a looking machinist," said Maguire.

Bonbright felt it to be a remarkably true saying.

"The boss takes this for a darn kindergarten," Maguire complained.

"Ever run a lathe or a shaper or a planer?"

"No."

"He said to stick you on a lathe.... Huh! What's he know about it?...

How's he expect this room to make a showing if it's goin' to be charged with guys like you that hain't nothin' but an expense?"

Bonbright got the idea back of that. Maguire was personally interested in results; Maguire wanted his room to beat other rooms in the weekly reports; Maguire was working for something more than wages--he was playing the game of manufacturing to win.

"You go on a planer," Maguire snapped, "and Gawd help you if you spoil more castings than I figger you ought to.... The boys here'll make it hot for you if you pull down their average."

So the boys were interested, too. The thing extended downward from the bosses!

"Goin' to work in them clothes?" asked Maguire, with a grin.

"Overalls," said Bonbright, tapping his parcel.

Maguire went to his desk and took a key from a box. "I'll show you your locker," he said; and presently Bonbright, minus his coat, was incased in the uniform of a laborer. Spick and span and new it was, and gave him a singularly uncomfortable feeling because of this fact. He wanted it grimed and daubed like the overalls of the men he saw about him. A boyish impulse to smear it moved him--but he was ashamed to do it openly.

Maguire led him to a big contrivance which was called a shaper. A boy of eighteen was operating it. On its bed, which moved back and forth automatically, was bolted a great cake of iron--a casting in the rough.

The machine was smoothing its surfaces.

"Show him," Maguire said to the boy, "then report to me."

The boy showed Bonbright efficiently--telling him what must be done to that iron cake, explaining how the machine was to be stopped and started, and other necessary technical matters. Then he hurried off.

Bonbright gazed at the casting ruefully, afflicted with stage fright.

... He was actually about to perform real labor--a labor requiring a certain measure of intellect. He was afraid he would make a mistake, would do something wrong, and possibly spoil the casting. He started the planer gingerly. It had not seemed to move rapidly when the boy was operating it, but now the bed seemed fairly to fly forward and snap back. He bent forward to look at the cutting he had made; it was right.

So far he was all right.... Surrept.i.tiously he laid his palm in a ma.s.s of grease and metal particles and wiped it across his breast.... It was an operation which he repeated more than once that morning.

Gradually his trepidation pa.s.sed and he began to enjoy himself. He enjoyed watching that casting move resistlessly under the tool; watched the metal curl up in glittering little curlicues as the tool ate its way across. He looked with pleasure at the surface already planed and with antic.i.p.ation of the surface still in the rough.... It was interesting; it was fun. He wondered vaguely if all men who worked at tasks of this kind found pleasure in them, not appreciating that years of doing the same thing over and over might make it frightfully monotonous. The truth was the thing had not yet become work to him. It was a new experience, and all new experiences bring their thrill.

Until the noon whistle blew he hardly took his eyes off his work. He did not know that Maguire pa.s.sed him a dozen times, not stopping, but watching him closely as he pa.s.sed.... With the stopping of work about him he realized that he was tired. He had lifted weights; he had used unaccustomed muscles. He was hot, sweaty, aching. He was hungry.

"Where do we eat?" he asked the man who stood at the next machine.

"Didn't you bring no lunch?"

"No."

"Some doesn't," said the man, as if he disapproved exceedingly of that cla.s.s. "They feed at the hash house across the street.... Hain't broke, be you?"

Bonbright understood the kindly offer implied. "Thank you--no," he said, and followed to the big wash room.